Excess & Defect

black & white rainbows

2012-01-26T11:22:00.000-08:00

I like stories. I like people telling them to me. Ok. I’m going to go ahead and tell you something.

Second of all, it was raining. But, you know that. That’s what I’m talking about, really. There is no first of all, and the second part, well, you already know it. So. So what? Right? Slick, gray streets glistening under pools of sodium-yellow light, the sour soggy bleats of cabs, gutters rushing trash-laden streams downhill, slouch-hat weather all over. Rain and more rain for Etta, all day the day she died.

“Bought her plastic diamonds with my winnings from the track.”

“Who?”

(It’s clearer, just because.)

“Madam Howsler. The one who was so loud in the mornings.”

“Oh those wider eyes, those tears that’ll splash.”

(The right to remain in motion, distinct from other rights, assumes lawlessness prevails.)

“Let’s mince words with comforting thoughts of disasters.”

(A pear, a pit, a huckleberry for all your pennies.)

“Choices get fewer as they abound.”

So, here’s your story.

From building to building we go, by way of car. I go forth strapped to a chair with a seatbelt. There’s crummy food to eat, each other to belittle, lights to make. Honestly, we’ve got it made; it’s just that we don’t even suspect it.

A guy’s tailing me. He’s got his lights off. The car’s a worried Chevy, gray and clanky, and it’s puttering along a few blocks back. Its days of passing smog checks are over. He’s getting hung up in traffic, so I try to take it slow too; give the guy a chance to catch up and get it together. It works and doesn’t. It’s like talking on the phone to a stutterer. I’m glad he’s at a distance though. He’s being careful. I appreciate that. He’s brave, for a wimp.

The influencing factors of my situation were particularly placed off kilter, then things sort of swung in the genial direction of decent luck for me. That was later on, though. Much later on.

It’s not the drops that get to you, it’s the drips. I was drowning my sorrows with bad habits of a more melancholy disposition than you’d ever believe coming from a guy like me. Car tires slushing through the belabored tows of a morning stuffed with mud-marbled clouds and clumpy oatmeal cobalt sky, pouring coffee over it all, grumpy and stiff and too tired to yawn. I was yanking the duvet off the guano-stained mattress of my existence.

I was looking for something distinct about my suffering that might make it worthwhile. A curb to leap from, maybe, and the indifference of bystanders, people who spend their whole lives waiting for lights to change. Terrible things happen to those who wait, sometimes, and I wonder if I have any friends or just people who haven’t become my enemies yet.

“Clearly there is no way I’m going to be fooling all these people into believing that any of this really happened.”

“It’s going on right away, almost now, almost. Got it?”

“Plus, it’s easy to shake it all off. Instants get lost in the proverbial shuffle.”

“Only I am known to know what’s saying yes to you these days.”

“Curiously, it’s left-handedness that gets out of the way.”

“I am loaning you some darkness. Here, give it a shot.”

The rain stopped, and it smelled so clean. Everything was crisp and sharply focused. Details sprung from clouds and gravel just the same. A damselfly drowned in a gutter.

So, the next thing I know I’m crammed in the back of a Datsun with two chubby characters of a dour disposition, speeding along well above the posted speed limit on highway 99, heading north just past Fresno.

She lost the note I gave her, the one with directions to the Hole-In-Two Club’s secret rendezvous. “A cloud’s shoes for your thoughts, honey dear.” There. That’s all she had time to say. “Very nice to not see you, I’m sure.” Something like that; but nobody’s giving out any awards around here. Not just yet.

Case closed.

I am telling this story. It is entertaining. You believe in it, in me, in what I am telling. Look for clues. It is important.

(Hey You! Concentrate!)

The third part is boring. Everybody skips it. They don’t realize what is happening. Let’s move on.

There are no movies playing. The story shifts gears here. Excitement is just around the bend. Hang in there. It’ll be worth it.

The painters went across the street. They were all dressed in white.

I asked them, “Painters, why do you all dress in white?”

The painters painted. They didn’t hear me, or something.

“I am asking you a question, painters.” I said.

The painters painted.

The painters were painting a fence white.

I asked them, “Painters, why do you paint that fence.”

“The show must go on,” the painters responded.

“Does the fence have to be white?” I asked.

“Of course,” the painters said. “It is always a white fence.”

“Pickets?” I asked.

“Always with pickets,” said the painters.

I thought this was sad.

The carpenters came on a Tuesday. They had ice picks and hard hats. Nothing was necessary.

I told them, “This is no mistake. Weekdays are good in theory, but we all know how reliable theories can be.”

“Untested?” Asked the carpenters.

“Mighty,” said I.

It was no use. The carpenters went their merry way.

A part is a whole on its own, sometimes. Voices carry and drown out the splashing. Don’t skim the details.

“I am beginning to suspect that you have no motive, that you are just avoiding linear narrative for kicks, and that you are merely a troublemaker, a lazy hack with the limitations of a television.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. Buddy.”

“I plead noncompliance.”

So, as things unfold, in the meantime, while the commercials run, as supper interrupts, we buckle down, intent on originality at all costs. It is in the telling that all hope resides.

A story? Well, here you go:

The barman was gone. It was still early. I couldn’t find the barman anywhere. I said, “Keep!”

Nobody answered.

I poured myself a letter. I mailed myself a drink.

“Where, oh, where is my barman?” I asked the bar.

“Nobody, not even the bar, has such enormous hands,” said the bar.

I kept quiet for the remainder of my time at the bar.

Sketch artists were drawing straws.

“Who got the short one?” I asked.

“We all did!” Exclaimed the sketch artists.

Nobody dropped their drawers over it.

“Can we go now?” The sketch artists asked.

“You already are,” I said.

They were.

Appetizers continued to be served.

Intermission comes and goes. A long hello bakes a goodbye for dessert.

“Where is your beginning?”

“Towards the middle.”

“And the end is…?”

“Nearer.”

Look! The story is unfolding. Pay attention, or sell it to the government for the price of your independence.

The presidents were singing, “Glory is fleeting.”

It turned out to be the case.

I asked the presidents, “Where are your running mates?”

The presidents said, “They’ve got our names.”

Amends were made.

The jackhammers of debating jerks continued to disrupt the peace and quiet of the world.

The golfers were clubbing a wolf.

“Is it crying?” I queried.

The wolf moaned.

“Barely,” said the golfers. “Just about barely.”

A loaf of bread became worth more than gold. I bowed deeply towards a dense thicket of pine trees.

“Decorations?” I asked.

“We don’t need flashy…” the golfers began to say, but were interrupted by the sound of mimes.

These mimes were minding everybody else’s business. The mimes were in attack mode. Typos abounded.

“Our blood is becoming less bold,” said the mimes.

“I wish that I could wish,” I said.

“Don’t we all,” said the mimes. “Now. Be silent. We’re being memed to death. Don’t look. Tell.”

Birds suppered on late-arriving worms. A bee went into cardiac arrest while sniffing mildly at a marigold. Appetites were whetted.

The anarchists were dressed in browns and greens, except for their blue suede shoes.

I asked them, “Where are your army boots?”

“Bravery is coming back into fashion,” replied the anarchists. “Music tells more than sense could.”

“Fodder rich?” I asked.

“Glowing!” the anarchists exclaimed.

I watched them as they marched single-file towards the ocean.

Nobody argued about the cost of supervision.

“Lose the mustache, commander,” said the Checkout Clerk.

“Not in this weather,” I ventured.

A price scanner beeped.

I said, “Look! Listen.”

The line diminished and grew behind me.

A cocktail cheated on a napkin.

“We have prisms here,” roared the caregivers. “Not prisons.”

“So,” said I. “Not locked up, but refracting.”

“A medium-level light has gone dim,” said the caregivers.

Somebody shouted, “I will take my socks off and shout at the lord!”

I rolled up my sleeves.

“Whatever happened to all the lunatics?” asked Dracula.

“They are dangerously safe,” I replied. “Bloodthirsty?”

“No. Sucker-punched,” said Dracula.

“Keeping up appearance for the ladies, I see,” said I.

A Motorola phone died silently.

The end is almost finished. Just a moment. Meanwhile:

“Give me some of that Pentecostal rhythm, that old Pentecostal rhythm,” sung the sign spinners.

“If it were good enough for me,” I said.

“That’s not the ticket.” The sign spinners said. “Not out or in.”

Ahem. Moving on. Until next time. Lastly, for now, the guy in the Datsun says something to the effect of: “I am stalking courageously (unhip) regarding guerilla tactics (for ground use only) the insights (likely) of those least-known of appropriate actions (like time tables) in lieu of applejack dessert (an open book, this scheme) almost war (over) it besides who cares about spring this time of year (?) no (.) right is now (almost) to (gone with again) there to there it goes (like flowers close) to make reminders of (forget it) exteriored grief or (don’t be sad, my little darling) it’s inside of (it isn’t out) made up (by and bye) squeezed silly and spun (taken for a letter) grants (a) right left late (by way of a passing lane) got without another it (placed to never show) quits before (all of the) bands go home (badly) for good.”

…to be continued

medgar evers tinkered to chance

2012-01-25T14:01:00.000-08:00

O’er their shins to dig back, so who wouldn’t? Here commandeering (hear’all) thee bestered criminals. Blames that work backlong or shirtless. Westered or lee entropic or you’s do-nothings. Vest, give it down, and this hack’s stance writes less ordered. Pleased we were luckpast and stowed pawning empty goryeyed. Glimmer &, chucked, we cough softer. Crime’s color burnt, crossways, empty(a to-be-seen) guilty’s knowing. U’s S’er-inding’s’ed in A, of course. Natural&only. Depart Chaucering. Lim e’er a cancan. Be bad. Poled pilgrims underdoing shats of ere years gone loonier than winy. Love’s my spoke soft’a’lee, this’a’that, hawkortalk, o’ed to pleases, also yesed for a close’s debate bout too’s morrow--still, repair. Rest a reason to lose light’s day. Nosoul’s a or m. U’s’A’d, believin’ all’s not ill. Boos howl more boos. Vats of it. Totaled & rowed & roar’t’s honeypie’d. Righty sirs. Left at it, gitted to prowl us for use, & we/us have at bullets, & backed by gov’s guns, gritty to sunbaked. Concrete’s’a mess. Busted. Vanish, to be, lurked after, the trailings of roses at deadpetal endings, thy’s selves. Pleading crass-loined, charged ex-temper(full) & igneous, lowered up, pincerbound, down as well. We’ve a few. That’s’a plenty. Me’d here, that’s’a like paperbagging gold, if they/you will. Glad or better to not comeclose to knowing. Stirred lest we shake awake to doorpoundingdowns. Mud’s slurring volumes, wellfed to ground, and kingly ‘tis lower-- foundout-- airy&dense. Coffee’d o’er ramparts & whatnot, too, alive as we were (you’d to slimy troughs) dotting thoughts, too, with an out to clank closed, by&by, done it to who, who’d to being done.

Oh, well, jim’s cricknecked, again crowed & against foremostly. Exclaimed o’er nobody’s where. Swapped smiles. & then, well we did, ‘tis a right-whistled pity, p’ing-oned, likely collides with a yet. Vanity’s a sure’s shame. Lower sour nottoswing charioted, ‘cause no’s no king. Passered to a bye’s badly mouthed good. My show’s just to place, coffinnails to fingertaps, casketed clean away. Buried body sans soul, lumps, originally memed, all in, as all’s jake, yet down’s a worry who worms about, & slips to chased hounds, them’s an all, or awe, we know? A hingesound and weallfallup.

Undone. Out’s blacker. Praying’s a hardly’s sought job. Together’ed or tethered, are we not? Lord. Lordy. Lord. I’m outta number-oneing ideas. Put the out in black, and we’re shiftering slightly slighted. No person is a gun’na care less I’m a tied loose-trained & hung for postcard’s pictures. A sighs loose begins to furl. Me? Some body to hurl dirt on, not once twined to joy’s country. Twelve miles to and from. No gas where’s all the yous can’t go, spilled blood’s oil’s concretedreams. For all the blacker jays of f’s okay. All thy wills, nearer hand’s never held, a rifle’s as just never’s well, be done for. We all here, compromised & expendable, who seek to upset tries of damn’s god for mississippi’s sake. See, this land’s a goner, sea-to-polished-dark, and we’ve lazed back uncounted, booted, sad-lashed bigbrowneyes for the morrows mends never made. To be, to be, to be, a-alright’s e already, okay’d beyond the great & the bad & the conquering bootsole of it all. People, they should’a listenup more. People. Blamed truant, pawned for a sigh, gush-- ing-or-out-- pro’d to every con sang in chains, trailed’trained’trippedover, yepped it’all back home-like, or named bound free-at-last, already. god’s hooks pry out’s business as staggering backshot halts-- driveway stains notwithstanding-- joint’ed luck gone for hemisphere’s of sorrow’s bleakest garden plot, dusted to ne’er turn away, rerunned to pardon’s tune, and we(themthat)gun fourscored to speak soft’s leeward gait, uncrowded cowards plea’bargain(again)against the rumpled brow(or)beaten nature-- weherewhofindtimetoforgivelestallwe’vegotturnswhisperedtoforgot.

public service announcement #47 (abridged version)

2012-01-19T11:12:00.000-08:00

male: Before meeting him, did you ever have trouble sleeping?

female: Yes. But not often. Just more like drifting off but never falling.

male: A slope. Yes. You’re headed downhill but…

female: There’s nothing, nothing there to…um, break my fall?

male: Slipping.

female: Or maybe gliding’s more like it.

male: What is it that keeps you gliding?

female: Well, you know, I was drawn to him at first-- well, this is kind of dumb-- but I liked the way he crossed his legs, how his socks showed a little. And it was delicate, almost like a balancing act, and his ankle kind of bobbing his brown oxford up and down softly. There was a certain way he had of leaning, reminiscent of James Dean, but not in the usual way, not in the glassy-eyed staring way of like coolly pressing the upper back to a wall while the legs shoot out at a sharp angle--something I call a reverse slouch. No. But it was similar, and it reeked of personality and style and a natural rhythm inherent in his internal combustion engine.

male: Shall I compare thee to an automobile?

female: Yeah. Ha. No. That’s just something I say sometimes. He had that certain charm that maybe an old Buick might have--a Cutlass. Ha. Or a maybe a Plymouth valiant. Just smooth but powerful, and graceful, you know? He had a certain something.

male: Je ne sais quoi?

female: Lightly. But no, I could put my finger on it. At least I thought I could then.

male: Then stranger realizations come, and then…

female: No. I’m confident I had him pegged early on. Souped-up sense of triumph, something dodgy in his willpower, a reluctance to admit the truth about his raison d'être. I shadowed him at first, you know that?

male: Just along for the ride.

female: Yep. And this got the proverbial foot in the door, for me. And he showed me this side of melancholy that he had, which I adored and hated at the same time. It was like having a crossword puzzle and no pen. You keep wanting to fill in the answers but you can’t.

male: Frustration at its subtlest.

female: Like spying on somebody who is totally uninteresting. It just bogs you down in this like morass of petty selfish habits, things you can’t swing your way out of. Back and forth, back and forth, and then it’s all the same and you can’t quit, like tics or something, things on the surface sinking in deeper until they’re part of you, until they take over and become all that you are. Then, well, you’re just…gliding along. Lah dee dah.

male: Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.

female: Lost and confused in a windowless basement, more like it. Lick away, you say. Well, that’s a man’s lost voice custarding over what, you know, we’re not associated to, well-- Pavlovian, right?-- to talk about?

male: The mad dogs of summer, and everything that you know.

female: I know. Queen of the barbershop. But where’s the pool table? I ask these things. Maybe that’s part of what gets me into trouble. And dreams, well, they sometimes just don’t come.

male: Floored me. Seriously.

female: I’m not taking notes. I hope somebody here is. It’s part of this, right? This equation?

male: Got me.

female: Rusting in peace, I see. Okay. Fair enough. So, back to this whole sleep-deprived looniness. It’s my way of crapping out maybe, lucking on to letting go, this shuddering around in dream-melt, just right on the precipice of nodding off, always never quite there.

male: Getting behind yourself.

female: Never even, never quite able to pull on ahead of the pack. Mildly in arrears to my past. I get it. I don’t get it. I’m attempting to not try to make an effort. An ashtray inlaid with a moon’s slice of silver surrounded by KO’d spoons.

male: Give thy thoughts not tongue and they will taste only themselves.

female: Is fear my way of staying safe? Blasted Quaker-Oats mornings. Shoes stomping overhead. I’m mid-shift in the work of my days.

male: Tell me about how you two met again.

female: Oh me. Oh my. Oh motherfucking my. Okay. Well, I was ordering a hamburger at this great little place called Pearl’s Hamburgers on the lee side of Nob Hill. It’s small and gets crowded, so I usually get stuff to-go. After placing my order for a well-done Deluxe (that’s what they call the regular hamburger there, I guess to make it seem more enticing to the average hamburger eater) I saunter on over to a table (it was actually quite empty in there that night), and plop down with my crossword puzzle and a Cactus Cooler to do some waiting. At this point I think I made up a song in my head (I do this quite often, you know) about my love for this delicious citrus beverage, something like, “I’m dreaming of a Cactus Cooler, just like the ones that the Jr. High vending machine in the PE locker room used to dispense for a quarter.” This was sung to the tune of White Christmas, but with an extended run-on style of squeezing all those words in the melody. It made me smile, and as I did so I guess I looked up for a sec, and there’s this guy sitting there across from me (actually rather close, as, you know, it’s not a very large dining area in there) leaning the back of his head against the wall with one leg balancing on the other knee, foot bobbing up and down, and I notice he’s got tigers on his socks. Interesting, you know? And I guess my smile was still there when I glanced at him, and he’s absently staring at me at the same time, and, well, our eyes meet, and I guess he figures I’m smiling at him. So, well, he smiles back. Right? Right? You know?

male: Cute.

female: Fuck you. Seriously. I no kid. I say, fuck to you.

male: Ah. You? You forget it, kiddo.

female: Why are we entering into another one of these….situations?

male: We’re not. You no worry. Continue, my fair lady, free of clouds and what not.

female: Okay. Well, then. Okay. So I guess it’s too late to pull back my smile. I decide without thinking to just go with it. He says, “Hey Delilah. Where’s Samson?”

male: Wait. He knows your name?

female: Oh yeah. I forgot. They ask for your name when you place an order there so they can scream it out when it’s ready. I always want to lie and give a fake name but I mostly chicken out at the last minute. He must’ve overheard me ordering.

male: Creepy.

female: No. Not really. Like I said, it’s a small place, and there weren’t many folks in there. Just a bored couple sitting at a table munching on sweet potato fries, and the tiger-socks guy, and me.

male: Oh.

female: So, this isn’t like the most original thing to say on the planet, right? It’s like when people sing me that awful Tom Jones song. Like I haven’t been hearing this shit my whole life.

male: People really lack originality in their banter, I’ve found.

female: Yeah. So, maybe this is like just a way of getting a conversation going. Usually I’d just brush it off and respond with monosyllabic shoulder-hunch type stuff until he stopped talking to me, and then go back to intently filling in the squares of my crossword puzzle. But, this guy? With him? I don’t know. It was different. There was a certain (and I know how this is going to sound) magic emanating from him. A charisma. A spell cast on me. Ugh. Yeah. That’s not really….anyway. We get to talking somehow, not really sure what my response was--probably something witty, a nice dry retort.

male: Probably.

female: And so we’re chatting. We start chatting. We are in the midst of a chat. Connections are being made. He’s very amusing, it turns out.

male: A plus.

female: Oh, I don’t believe in them.

male: Minus, then.

female: Sure. Maybe we’re just jabbing at each other, mostly. Feeling out the terrain. Scouting out features, taking things in with a swooping gander here and there. He’s got a bony physique. One of those guys who would actually look good in a skinny tie and tapered mod-style suit, which he is not wearing. It’s just something that popped into my head as I was looking him over.

male: Will that be a purchase or a rental?

female: Both. Anyway. He’s just got on some brown Dickies and a white button-up, a green army-type jacket, and fingerless gloves.

male: Oh. A reader of paperbacks in cold weather.

female: Perhaps. Those gloves are cool though. I like them. It wasn’t a bad sign at all. In fact, everything about our interaction was tickling me. I was doing a lot of giggling.

male: The techniques of flirtation.

female: Well, it’s fashionable to behave in public. I don’t like causing a scene.

male: That reminds me of something you said about…

female: I know. I know. I never wanted to be one of those people who’s always like getting all stressed out about relationship stuff. It made me want to vomit, those types of things.

male: Yes. That’s about right where I left off.

female: Jesus. We act like teenagers still, for the most part, don’t we?

male: To the young go the wasted spoils. Trivial delights; trivial ends.

female: Oh holy shit. Come off it. We’re just capitalizing on what’s put right there in front us. It’s to everybody’s advantage, really. Stalking from close range. Gauging the particular energy scope of what’s fluctuating from giving to taking. Even my toaster gives me the creeps sometimes.

male: Pop goes the…

female: Ahem. Well then. So, I’m not floored or anything, but it’s nice, you know? Just conversing and stuff. It’s like how dogs sniff each other’s butts when they meet. You go along through with things because you’ve-- I don’t know-- just got this feeling about it. And, sure, yeah, maybe you’ll find out that what you thought you felt was bogus, or that you are; but it goes and goes, this kind of thing, and it’s not like you get to choose.

male: Sometimes it just finds you…chooses you.

female: I know, right? And then you’re done for. That’s it. Love gets its mitts on you, sticks a fork in, flips you over a few times, and then lunch is over. Time to move on.

male: Or wait for dinner.

female: Or you just kill your appetite, starve yourself, and flounder around in between things.

male: For today we make do, though, bite through the gristle and give it the best we can’t.

female: The spin on my world.

male: What?

female: Just like that. Splat! And there it all goes, everywhere, gushing, longing, gone and here too. It’s all a jumble, and you dive in, you leap for joy and suffering into a forever never after before any of it could ever try and make any sense.

male: What? I mean, what?

female: Nothing.

male: Are we talking x’s or o’s here?

female: Nothing. Just drifting again. We used to trace each other’s hands on the placemats in fancy restaurants.

male: Oh.

female: Yep. Oh. That’s right. That about does it. There’s nothing. There’s just too much, so there’s nothing. He’d run his fingers through his hair all the time. He’d yawn a lot when he’d leave me voicemails. I rarely ever knew what kind of thoughts he had swishing through that hell-bent head of his.

male: On what?

female: Don’t know. Just a concentrated effort, well, maybe to just stay put, to go nowhere. Like a butterfly trying to stay in one tiny spot in the air, hovering, making all this commotion just to remain still. Inertia’s a full-time job, I guess.

male: This is me gasping with delight.

female: His phone was always on silent.

male: Gasp. See? Gasp.

female: Uh huh. Yep. That figures. When your attention wanes you get silly, lopsided and indiscreet.

male: If there were a wish to wear for a wish’s hair…

female: Stop it. Seriously.

male: Okay. Seriously.

female: There was something…I don’t know, magical about him, or us…whatever. I don’t know.

male: Nobody does. You just go around trying things. Maybe you learn. Maybe you forget, too.

female: Floating maybe does more to describe it. Spun wonderfully. Gooey and sustained. We’re not so delicate, really. Been all over town and around more than a few blocks. But now I…I only want to get on back home again.

male: Look homeward, angel.

female: Can’t.

male: Don’t I know it.

female: Not again. Like golden fields roasted to a burnt sienna by sunset. You just keep gazing, even after it’s long gone.

male: Like whisky and maple syrup. Like air raid sirens on your birthday.

female: And I keep lashing out, in a lather, dressed to go, and fretting over that first step-- or like testing out the water with a toe, being too scared to dive in, to be immersed in whatever the world’s going to eddy my way. Sooner or later, well, I get cold just waiting.

male: But the water’s still an unknown, and that’s chillier in your thoughts than anything you’ve got. But it could be better, right?

female: He used to sing me that John Denver song. You know, the one about leaving on a jet plane. Except he’d sing it in a real deep, gravelly voice, like Cookie Monster doing a bad Howling Wolf impersonation. It always made me very happy when he did that. We’d just be lying there in bed, just lazing around, and he’d start singing it, and it’d be so nice, just lying there like that, happy and warm all over.

male: Then so…

female: Yeah. Then it goes on and spills into a, “than,” a, “rather,” a, “just because.” And you’re all alone, drifting, gliding, slipping on down or away, and nobody’s going to catch you when you…

male: Get too sappy.

female: Yep. That about does it. And I can’t ever seem to ever get that goddamn song out of my head.

male: She who forgets herself is blessed to repeat herself.

female: Words made of breath.

male: And breath of life?

female: Ah, fuck it. Alas and alack, and all that. Harrumph.

male: It makes the eyes go blank. It steals your tongue. It advertises itself in the trembling of a hand. It drinks itself to sleep.

female: It lands on the moon. Reflections of what you missed the most, shiny and slippery, drowned before you even dared to dive in.

male: Old enough to not be young enough to be insane and lost anymore.

female: Never. That’s the sort of b.s. that gets you in trouble with the law.

male: The Law!

female: Yep. The Law!

male: There’s no use! We’re insufferable. We’ve become those boring people whose lives we used to spit on.

female: But we can still dance, just as well as always, blustering with moon-swamped hearts, capering around in clown suits through craters of misunderstandings. But. But. But. We can, right?

male: Don’t know.

female: He blinked a lot. More than most. It felt so nice, the way he held my hand, like it was a flower he was afraid of crushing but didn’t want to let get away.

male: Stand still.

female: Okay.

male: Now, close your eyes.

female: Got it.

male: Reach your hands out. Stretch out those arms. Wiggle ‘em all over the place. Now, go limp with them. Just let them dangle there. Now, shake your torso all around like you’re having a seizure. That’s it. Good. Flap and flop away. Flap and flop away. Great. Shake it! Shake, shake, shake it! Great. Feel better?

female: Ha hahahahhahah baahhhhh!

male: See?

female: What?

male: You’re just a bunch of bones and muscle wrapped up in skin. It’s easy, this business of being alive.

female: But danger’s so alluring. Guarantees lack a certain charm. And it always comes down to a, “when.” You know? When things were like that, when you were my everything and I was your only girl, when we danced all night long, always a, “when” that’s so far from a, “now.”

male: Get drunk. You’ll be alright.

female: I will?

male: Sure.

female: A loudness that’s almost something lost to sound, we plunge ahead, onward towards what’s up and out and all over the upside-down miracles of who we are.

male: As you were. There. Good. Got it. Great.

female: Wow. Much better.

male: Same as it ever was.

case sensitive

2012-01-12T14:18:00.000-08:00

we talk around it all almost all the time. sure we had splinters. got them really, when they were there to get. i keep having to remind marvin that he’s not me. it’s useless. he’s unsure of his own personality. who does he want to be, really? me? well, go on ahead then. be my guest. i don’t let the botched crap of his whims get me all ensnared in a potpie lunch of take-it-or-take-it lunging. we’ll get through this bushmills inspired nightmare sooner or soon. some lunatic yammering, like, ‘you would.’ i will, sometimes, but mostly i don’t-- get it that is. what’s it to say something and go all over town with it, just the saying of it, and never get around to being anywhere, really? it’s bruised and unhealthy. well, you got me. marvin? he’s keeping it open-faced at least. i tell him to mind his own. he wants to mind mine too though. it’s a shit deal, the one we’re dealt here. the reality of faking it burps over what’s cranium bound in the first of all last places. well, boo-motherfucking-hoo, you know? marvin’s shitty with names. i tell him to stop using mine. sometimes it even works. go figure, huh? i say things like, ‘marvin, marvin, marvin. it’s not marv or vinny. it’s a secret nobody keeps. marvin, look here,’ and stuff and stuff like that too. but marvin’s so spastic really. it’s too little to ask. he calms down for you when he can, though, and i look the other way enough to show i care. marvin’s out of sorts. there’re times it’d take a penny to wish him down from where he’s not. you get bluer when the nights bless your sad sack of a soul with inky shit-stained how-don’t-you-doings. me? i’m cursed just the way i am. marvin’s given up chickening out for a month. it does him okay. it’s a way to go about breathing, just like any other. i’m keeping my drawers up and the window shades drawn. don’t ask me to go looking for an alibi. plenty of rest is not coming this way. sorest throat in the west, goddamn. lower than rising too late for lunch. is that me? i don’t know. six or two ways from laundering dirty thoughts, that does the worst of mostly good. we get concave about it, and this thing here, as sure as a bet against the long shot, gives better odds than i’m capable of passing over, for now. being flurried to incapable standards of giving the good old flex of the brain muscle to passersby, that gives all my goats away. for marvin it’s never the same thing. he goes twice around the block with everything. no debate about it. some people, well they just wanna go ahead and spill their guts to you about their personal problems, the story of their life, because maybe well they start in on believing you’re some kind of rump roast for their attention, and i span it most times, not like marvin does, but close, at least. we’ve got a nutshell to crack over it, fried about a rasher of bacon of it, tussled with the grit of it, yep. that’s a taker’s give if i’ve ever known such a thing. so i tell marvin, ‘stop faking it, man,’ or some crap as such, and he goes off kilter with it, and again, i’m the last guy who’ll ever stitch a lemon with barbwire, but this crass how-might-it-not-go questionnaire attitude’s getting no person any-old-where already. cop out of it already, you know? and then there are those reminders, those things i keep almost chanting, to nobody’s bad, like, ‘marvin, marvin, marvin, stop using my personality routine, ok?’ i practice at it, sure, but not so much that it matters. acting’s another schmo’s gig. we get too hung up, marvin and me, using each other as substitutes. my instincts are better. my memory’s classy. marvin’s got issues with the chicness of his own cool. he wears pajama bottoms to funerals. it’s stuff like this that’s going to take this here situation to the canary cage. i’d rather gargle motor oil than rewrite a copy of this guy’s shtick. let me be the last to tell you, it ain’t gonna do nothing but hinder you in the end. the cats are snoozing. i make the most of my car-alarm shrill indifference. blare with me, barely, and you’ll get some indecency stuck in your teeth, or pickle breath at the most. i’m not the forgiving type, but will dabble in it if i must here and there. claims are clamming up too low on the higher ground of being kicked over graveyards. hand me a hotdog with relish and i’ll button up about whatever it is for a few bun-lengths. gotta hand it to marvin though. he’s a real overachiever when it comes to angelic barstool poses. off and on the record, napkins have fewer uses over on this side of the rainbow. faring well? that’s not in my jurisdiction. i don’t know jack from squat about it. long’s the lord’s byways through these broken-down shivering strips of land. older crampings of shocked style crap out earlier, or we’ll get the baseboards’ opinion about the whole shaved onion of it. that’s certainly better than potatoing around watching marvin do bad imitations of somebody impersonating me. tender joy, i don’t get it, you know? watch the tv. let the years go by. we make ourselves into time-murdering slobs. it’s not most of a guess, a winged hostility gone rampant and plunged before it was ever flushed. under the hills and around the woods to some joker’s idea of a milked cow we go. the bottom of the world is plagued by weeds. and to top it all off? i’m rushed with more modern constructs of junk-mailed satisfaction than any sometimes-the-bear-eats-you well wishing. infernal machines of noisy reduction? shit. i mop up more distraction from the candy of marvin’s attention span than’d lure a whole busload of tykes from their tidy chambers of consumption. i tell marvin, ‘it’s me, not you.’ but he don’t listen as well as he should. a commonplace list of whatever goes over with the out crowd, that about does it for his depictions of what it means to be me. marvin’s lost though. nothing’ll get him found at this point. pull back the trigger. let the turtles sing. i’m not asking with an almost friendly grimace. greedy luck slumps backwards and stabs what’s tourniqueting the last lees of disappointed harmony peeking so longingly out from beneath the pink hues of formerly white undershirts. trained to be taught just enough to get by, marvin’s habitually peeling the layers of others off like skin in order to shape his own whims in the colors of stuff he’s mostly just too damn scared to dream of. me? i draw my own figures in sloggy boredom. call me cured of concealment. well, anyway, just call me. the full moon’s got a soup stain halo. that’s one thing. here’s another: we are creatures of our own creation. something maybe marvin thought of on one of those abysmal cold nights you get in mid-january when he couldn’t sleep, and, you know, that means he’s up stomping around bashing his head into the dollhouse again. i’m conversing with walls and ceilings myself most nights, so i know the goings of these ways. too hard to softly tell the plain sameness of differently aligned slogans, like dumbass number one or a dozen of ‘em; it’s all rutabagas to me. there certainly are things, though, that i don’t let on--or off--about to marvin, such as whose lips are less dangerous than a fortune teller’s assistant’s; and who’s frittering away this much on a day like this? somebody else. yep. gotta take it as it gets given out sometimes. especially on days when we’re all sipping from the same cup of piss, can’t hit for shit, and it’s breakup weather all over. shit. call off the cops and watch the diesel smoke out of my nose. marvin’s using my facial expressions to lure emus away from the metal fences, soft-boiled eggs be damned. it’s almost as terrible as being stuck in a room with a bunch of bad standup comedians--almost. there are certain things i can take only so much of, like people slurping soup, and then it’s blackjack-me-and-tie-me-to-the-railroad-tracks time. lord. i remember the dogs and how they woke me in the attic where i was spending my nights then, before marvin started in on his aping, if i remember anything at all those nights without hugs when the drain pipes rattled me to sleep. green and brown days are what we’re stuck with now, and it just so happens that we don’t aspire to be heaped with pannings. who would? maybe marvin, though i doubt it. he’s a sucker for attention. gets his lips puckered for any situation. always on call for that moment of concupiscent bliss, that marvin. and sometimes we get to ribbing the one-out-of-many king, the king of ice cream, in hopes of it’s-its for our prickliest thoughts. nobody pays to digest. it’s a fill’er-up attempt at magnanimity, if you’re asking this washed-out tammany hall dropout. shit. not even mr. tweed could’ve reeled in this balancing act of crusty-to-crumby botches and boots. strung up or out, it makes a songbird out of a cranky guyed mast. somewhere they’re singing in a pentatonic scale about mumbling us back to dust, and there are probably takers who’ll grab onto any bargain for a phony spree of shoplifted elation, liked to it about all you can, having it everybody else’s way, well, at least suckers are still being spanked to life by the bread losers there and here. got to figure in about fads of fashion, as v-neck sweaters are flying off the rack this time around, and, also, of course, my favorite brand of gum. we’re cracking. it’s inevitable. marvin’s getting more or less more alone all the time. hard-pressed, we take our time too, and the sun’s all glitter and gold and hunches of lost languages, and guildenstern lives through rosencrantz’s lost cheer and brain tossing, and heaven’s spying on us. but i tell marvin to get himself a new persona this time around. i tell him to stop gouging the right-of-ways that we’ve still got left. it’s tantamount to not giving a shit, that’s the way i put it. but nobody’s dashing enough to plummet my hopes of never becoming “one of those people” whom i keep swearing i’ll never turn out to be. so, as far as this dross with marvin goes, the graffiti’s in process. it’s all a done deal. we’ve been keeping the mayor employed long enough. i want to laugh at tourists again, go to bed early, get a bad haircut and brag about it, ride a roller coaster in the rain and vomit while upside down on the loop. marvin? marvin’s getting a crash course in abdominal pain, and then there’s the way he expectantly straddles a tipsy stretch of yawns with excitement. being gone is a pleasure we’ll cash in our chips for any new day, punch lines pulled, fingers uncrossed, lazy summer days swarming with throngs of winged insects and the oily mechanics in the trees’ geometry, something irked and chassised, something done with getting along well with others, a brandished plastic sword that’d be better suited to stirring a drink than slicing through this morass of junked luck. but the crux of the whole marvin situation, the begged opting we caress out of staying put, is that we’re here to deliver. but i’m bad at fair shares and mayonnaise soup’s not my thing and the bald eagles are all on rogaine and i’m famished after supper and bed’s a jukebox and home’s a trick without a treat and there’s a train getting smaller and smaller as it approaches, and marvin’s gone and lost his marbles, and his eyeballs are only fooling. the distortion of larger small talk gets in the way, sentenced to go like this. and, so as it all goes and goes, well, me? i just don’t get it. and, well, that’s really all there is to know.

sermon on the dismount

2012-01-08T19:28:00.000-08:00

This is what happens. You see, I’m standing at the ATM, urinal-like, you know? And the screen’s filling up with stuff about my transaction processing. I’m just kind of absently gawking at it. Not really reading the words, but looking at them, standing around, biding my time, swaying back and forth, trying to whistle too, waiting for my cash to be dispensed. And then the screen goes blank for a sec. No biggie, right? Yeah. But then, get this, the screen suddenly reads: “YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE, BUDDY.” I’m like, wha…? You know? So, I like rub my eyes and then gander on back at the screen. It’s still there, the same thing. Well, you know, I’m thinking, ‘It’s sort of true sometimes. I can be a bit of an a-hole. But how the hell does this machine know that I’m an asshole?’ I mean, I haven’t even been standing there that long. Can it like sense my asshole-ness? Well, let me just say too, that it’s not all that I am; I’m not a complete asshole. That’d be different. The ATM could probably pick up on that right away. No prob. I could see that. But my asshole percentage has got to be--and I’m trying to be as honest as possible here--right around like 20 to 25 or so, on a bad day. Maybe it’s something about how I insert my card into its slot, or the way I’m super impatient and talking shit about the ATM as I wait for that twirling/blinking image of “PROCESSING” to go away. Not that I’m being like a big-time dick about it. It’s nothing over the top. Just the usual cussing and fucking around that goes on when dealing with inanimate things taking up my valuable time, you know? Nothing to write home about. So, I’m shocked, to say the least, and kind of just gaping at the screen, waiting for my eyes to unscramble and maybe realize that it’s just a mild hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and a lousy diet. Plus, I’m prone to see odd things where most folks just see ordinary-type stuff. I once was convinced that the guy in those Gieco commercials was speaking to me through the TV. Also, I have many times tried to place a delivery order for Chinese food at a steak house. It seems there are certain things I just don’t understand in the way most people do. I’ve been told that I, “just don’t get it.” This may be true in some situations, but I get by okay; and, I’m not really that big of an asshole. Just a small-to-medium sized one, really. Ask anybody? But the screen doesn’t change. The letters are red and bold: “YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE, BUDDY.” Buddy? I mean, that just about bowled me over. Was it trying to make me seem like even more of an asshole by being nice about it? Jesus, demoralized by an ATM. My life was in serious need of some reevaluation. I’m in shock, though, you know? And I start to sort of look around, checking to see if some joker’s hiding around the corner with an iPhone recording this whole scene, like some Candid-Camera/Punk’d nonsense. But that seemed iffy. I mean, it wouldn’t be that funny of a prank. And it seemed like way too much effort to go through just to “punk” me, somebody who is not famous at all; and anyway, there’s a boatload of better stuff they could’ve done, like making the machine talk back to me, cussing up a storm in a Stephen Hawking voice. That’d be somewhat entertaining at least. But this? I don’t know. It was just weird. Didn’t seem too entertaining to watch some ordinary doofus just kind of act a little bewildered at a message on the screen of an ATM. Not much of a payoff, really. So, well, I just sort of stood there and waited for the message to go away. But it kept not going away. And the damn ATM is not dispensing my cash. It’s not doing anything, not making a sound. Not one tiny ATM gear is turning in there. Nothing. I’m fucking floored. Like, what the fuck, you know? Just because I’m sort of a small-time a-hole sometimes, well, that shouldn’t preclude my ability to obtain some cash from a goddamn ATM, right? I’ve seen much bigger assholes than myself use ATMs with no problem. And, to top it off, of course, my fucking debit card is stuck in this righteous beast of an ATM, and it ain’t spitting it back out to me, so it seems, any time soon. So I’m standing there, cardless, cashless, unable to leave and pissed off; and this fucking ATM is blaring in all caps, big and red: “YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE, BUDDY.” I was not having an enjoyable time. It was a cold night. I wasn’t dressed to be out in it for very long. I thought I’d just run a quick errand or two and head home, and so was just wearing like a thin sweater. So, I’m like shivering and performing the straight-jacket pose there in front of the ATM, shaking my head, and, well, kind of feeling at this point, well, embarrassed about the whole scene. I’m an asshole. Okay. So what? What business is it of some money-dispensing device to butt on into my affairs and try to make me feel bad about what a jerk I can be on occasion? And wasn’t this ATM behaving rather asshole-ish anyway, calling me names and making me wait a fucking eternity for my money? And yes, that’s right: my money. It was mine. I had a right to it, right? How’s that being an asshole? I’m like, “Give me my fucking money you goddamn dickhead computer.” It’s not like I was robbing the thing. You’re an asshole, buddy. Hell of a note, you know? Shit. And I’m freezing my ass off, standing there like a complete fucking moron, waiting for this like electric surge or technical glitch or whatever to be over with so I can like jet and get on with my fucking life. So, I notice there’s this phone number on the ATM that it says to call if you’re having any trouble with the machine. I get out my phone and dial it up. I mean, I think the machine calling me names while not giving me my money or my card back qualifies as trouble. It rings for a long time, and then goes to a recording. I’m like, oh shit, not this. This breaking-up voice is droning on about, “If you are having service issues with any of our network ATMs outside of your qualified service area, please hang up and dial 1-888-918-2400. If your call is concerning the restrictions placed on your balance, or if you feel you have reached this recording in error, please stay on the line and one of our agents will be on the line shortly to offer assistance.” It just kept repeating more of that same crap, and then the damn phone starts beeping at me and the line goes dead. Nice. Real nice. And this whole while the ATM’s blinking that same damn all caps message at me: “YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE, BUDDY.” I’m like, “Oh, holy shit. This is so fucked up.” But there’s nothing I can do. And I’m in a rather desolate part of town, and it’s pretty late on a Monday night too, so it’s even more deserted than usual. And I’m just standing there getting more and more enraged. So, I go up to the damn machine really close and start screaming at it and pounding on the glass and stuff. I’m like, “You motherfucking piece of shit fucking cocksucker of a fucking machine, give me my fucking card back! Ah!” In other words, I suddenly realize, acting like a complete asshole--which, I also realize, makes the machine right about me, that I am an asshole. And it’s telling me about it nicely. The machine is just politely stating a fact. I’m the one making all the fuss. Shit. I don’t know. It just kind of struck me. And then there I was, like some idiot tilting a pinball machine, trying to get some mechanical device to do my bidding. What a schmuck. Shaking my fist at this lifeless wall of electric-lighted dots and dashes, freezing my balls off, infuriated over some petty inconvenience. What a sight. I started thinking, ‘Is it really worth it. Getting all bent out of shape over something as stupid as, well, when it comes down to it: money?’ There was a tree there in the sidewalk, maybe a poplar or a cottonwood, and for some reason I looked up at it. It caught my eye. It was deep into the depths of winter, and its branches were all gnarled and wiry and leafless, like it had all these disjointed knobby elbows jutting out all over the place. I got all contemplative, I guess. My mind went numb and bleary. As I gazed up through all those bare limbs, well, I noticed there was some sky up there, up above it all, and noticed--for the first time in like quite a decent while-- the stars up there too, set into the inky black like rhinestones or silver sequins coruscating away, free and each alone but not lonely, sewed into the hems of the universe. And you know what? It was fucking nice. It made everything seem okay. And the world was going on as it always had. It was we humans who had tricked ourselves into thinking that anything we did was going to make a difference. It was such an odd thing, being a human, alive in this way that I was. We were all just some sort of conduit, a set of perceptions for God to see the world with, because God wasn’t alive. God couldn’t see or touch or listen to the world he’d created. And he needed us, all of us who were alive, to see and hear through. Each of us was an incredibly tiny part of god, yet not one of us was insignificant. And we’d all do so much better if we’d just stop worrying all the time, and did our part to be kind and to enjoy this world we had this one time we were lucky enough to be given to go through living in. God wasn’t a single being, not in any such way as our minds could comprehend of it at least. It was more like a massive combination of all things, all life, every last atom, all the molecules and dimensions beyond our ability to grasp. We could be so much more than we think, if only we’d stop trying so hard to be something we’re not, going around, you know, trying to make the world adapt to us instead of seeing things as they are: infinite. Oh, and so all this romantic humanitarian shit’s like capsizing my head, and I’m getting a little dizzy and lightheaded, staring at that stupid tree and the piece-of-shit starry sky and stuff. I’m not so smart. The ATM beeped or blipped at me, and I spun around, snapped right out of my trance, and the screen’s blank, black, totally empty, and my card is being ejected out of the slot, and there’s my money too, just waiting for me to snatch it and be on my way, and I wanted so much to just hurry away, to be gone, anywhere else but there where it was cold and lost and as lonely as anything I’d ever known, and then I realized that I wasn’t sad at all, that I was joyous, filled with a glowing ember of faith, and I went to the machine and reached for my debit card, and it was warm in my palm, and the money was gritty and true and felt good crunching in my fingers as I folded it into my wallet, and I was thankful, I was so thankful, mercy was bestowed upon me, and I gave thanks, and dear lord, yes, I gave thanks, and I give thanks…

on new year’s even astrophysicists get drunk

2011-12-31T20:34:00.000-08:00

“I don’t want your heliospheres.”

“Your yes. Your nose.”

“Pleiades, please. There’s room here and there, past there’s here, for bouncing baby boys.”

“Got a gotcha of interstellar mediums comin’ right atchya!”

“A stellar nursery for the never born, and, you you you you you know…that’s it, alright?”

“GMCs to all get out.”

“Ah, go bok globule yourself.”

“Thackeray it up. Go ahead.”

“Don’t make me gravitational collapse your ass.”

“Besides the point.”

“Whose besides?”

“Yours, mine, and all those grownups we know.”

“Which?”

“Ah, forget it. I’m my own magnetosphere.”

“We’re all just dust in the solar wind.”

“Playing it simple, Ganymede?”

“Oh, alright. Charged particles.”

“At least. But I’ve got to check my magnetic filed lines first.”

“Gladly?”

“Yep. Gladly.”

“Buckle up that radiation belt. Wag that magnetic tail. Get those dipoles straight.”

“You polarized son of an Orion.”

“Quantum mechanical dipole operator, can you help me place this call? Because I can’t read the atomic number that you just gave me.”

“How about we engage in a bit of Stark broadening, for starters?”

“That’s about as close as I’ll get to beating a live horse.”

“Okay. Good. Dandy.”

“Ah, gimme a good old classical linear rigid motor any day over that quantum crapola.”

“It’s like when you’ve got to shit but the toilet seat’s too cold to sit on.”

“Maybe sorta.”

“Let me get my gyroscope out, shiny new gimbals and all.”

“Torque the hell out of it, buddy. Give it a good go.”

“Foucault would kick the shit out of you just for mentioning these unmentionables.”

“What?”

“Sick the dogs on him boys. Go right on ahead.”

“I’m a ghost. I’m a wish never wished. I’m bowing out and heading for lesser’s well-known territory.”

“Get me a drain. I wanna go down, down, down.”

“Cheese it. I cried with the whole lot of you, quite near 49 times, too.”

“Canopy whatever you’d like. I am nearer than dear.”

“Sniffle, sniff, sniff.”

“Very’s the new sure thing. I’m likely a cactus, more than anything, now.”

“Cured and all raised to heaven all the days and none of the nights.”

“Pop’s opened all through the closed signs. We candle-light our destiny by playing coy with the universe.”

“And the crowd roars, and the music stops, and the traitors lay down their arms. Excitement works short shifts.”

“I’m yawning on the inside.”

“You too?”

“Blessed be the advertisements. And yes, our children are becoming weekend thieves. Trust me, the CB’s getting nothing but sonic booms.”

“Let’s play mean with the prettiest pieces of mindless chatter.”

“Good grief, my man. Good motherfucking grief.”

“Expired patents loaned out to trust-busting hucksters asleep in study carrels, absorbed in their own mediocrity. The clock ticks, but for whom?”

“Intestinal parasites. Locust-gum addicts. Bored auctioneers. Men passed out on rattan patio furniture.”

“There is a refrain I’m refraining from stating just about right about now.”

“Holy holy holy holy.”

“Well, jump my bones, pleat my pants, and call me Armadillidium vulgare, why don’t you?”

“The devil’s a madman praying hardly anymore in the sidecar of god’s chopper. Let’s fit in. Let’s be nicer than kind. Let’s cook everybody’s goose while we still can.”

“Founded on being out of step. Boo to it all. Boo.”

“Put on your best sweater. Let’s keep it cool in here.”

“I’ve got the worst answers you’d ever want to hear.”

“Plus?”

“No. Minus. Always minus.”

“First one to lose wins.”

“Like it or like it.”

“I am just a bundle of hankerings. Choices elude me. Stop the mail and cuss out the mayor on the local news. We all don’t get what we do.”

“Another and another and another, and this year’s end is another. Just another another.”

“No fooling?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Run across the lawn with me. We’ll toss confetti, stir it in our brandy with neon swizzle sticks, close down the video stores and wreck havoc on middle-class charm. Come on. Run with me. Run.”

“The bells are playing innocent when you dream. I cannot run. Cross my legs and hope to cry. Not no more. I cannot run no more. Not no more. Popcorn’s a good substitute for ambition, eagerness, and also sentimentality. I cannot run like that, no, not like that. I cannot run like that no more. Not no more.”

“Eavesdroppers make better firing squads than sarsaparilla drinkers. Forget me. I am not alone like that. Not like that.”

“Been around long enough to not know. Oil drums flame. The tankers are gone to war. Be not sour about thy dormant longing. Kiss the morning for me. I ain’t comin’ round here no more. Not no more.”

“Mushy mushy.”

“Fireworks, woots of joy, a hollering in the spotlight, chips flaking off shoulders, very monumental creeks in the woodwork of the world. I am spirited and lightly sprinkled with diffidence.”

“Superannuated natural laws epitomize our dangling lives. We linger ‘neath the shadows that vultures make.”

“Dream me away. I do not exist.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Acquaintances long gone, lest we forget to remember less of what they were, more or less.”

“Been gone long gone too long gone for too long, gone.”

“Up where the air is…?”

“Well, shit. Who knows?”

“Freshly soiled.”

“I am not convinced that unconventional means do the warm’s work. We still all got head colds, and the covers won’t pull anymore, and it’s not any newer, this year. It’s not. It’s not the same though. It’s not.”

“A billion stars for your nightmares. Don’t worry. I’ll keep ‘em safe.”

“Let me pick. Just don’t let me choose.”

“Pack my bags.”

“You’re already there.”

“So? Where is there?”

“It’s where there is.”

“Where?”

“There, there, there. See?”

“Oh. Okay. Yes. Needless to…say?”

“Revive me when you pass out.”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

the epistemological limits of certain porous borders

2011-12-16T11:23:00.000-08:00

God is talking to me. He’s using Geico television commercials. It seems he is not a particle, but all particles. Sub-atomic or not. Heavy or weightless. It’s more than a matter of matter. I know. God talks to me.

God appears to me as the spokesman in Geico commercials. I mean, come on, think about it: if God were going to go to all the trouble of coming on down to earth and taking on the form of a man, well, let’s just say he could’ve chosen a lot worse. The hair alone is enough. When he squints and asks that rhetorical question about saving money on car insurance, well, he’s really making that gesture just for my sake. There’s something hidden there, something he’s intimating just for me, a slight tic that’s so abstract and condensed in a single motion that only I’d notice it. Sometimes I don’t understand what he’s trying to say, and (I’m ashamed to admit) I grow angry with God. I wish that he’d not be so ambiguous and indirect, that he’d just come out with it already and tell me what’s what. But, I know, with patience I shall learn deeper meanings, and that if it were easy to get messages from God, well, everybody’d be doing it. No. I’m special. I’ve been chosen for a reason. I must concentrate and decipher deeper understandings in the context of God’s word. “Could switching to Geico really save you 15 percent or more on your car insurance?” Oh lord, you speak in such mysterious ways. I pray that faith will sustain me long enough to distill the essence from these things.

I maintain humbleness at all times. Saltines and tap water sustain me during the darkest hours. More than anything I wish to be less selfish, to accrue humility in the vast stocking of my soul as I flip through the channels of my Samsung 42-Inch High Definition Plasma TV. The commercials, they come and go. I maintain diligence, not letting the regularly scheduled programming interrupt my quest. I am waiting for a sign.

God speaks through a medium that will disguise him easily (nobody’d expect God to be making TV appearances) yet allow him to reach his “audience” (i.e., me) in the most accessible of ways. You see? It makes sense. I understand these things.

Reaching out, or at least attempting to, I get on my knees before the TV. The warm glow is comforting and soft. I close my eyes. I pray so hard it’s like my head will burst. Suffused with a steadfast belief that I am okay, that all is right with the world, that all is happening as it should, I send my love through the neon-lamp cells and phosphors, into the coaxial cables and optical fiber light pulses, away into the dark unknowns of the heavens. God answers my questions with a sly raise of his eyebrow, and I know that all is well. My sweat glistens, and I am healed, not forsaken, in the TV’s warm glow.

Curbing my emotional landscape, making amends for wrongs I’ve been too scared to make right, I take into consideration some pertinent questions: “Does Johnny Daniels play a mean fiddle? Does a 10-pound bag of flour make a really big biscuit? Was Abe Lincoln honest? Is having a snowball fight with Randy Johnson a bad idea? Is a bird in the hand worth two in the bush?” These are things that require deep, uninterrupted contemplation. I hit the mute button and stare into the HiDef pixels, searching for a deeper meaning, and all becomes a coagulated blur, and I am calm and content. My mind goes blank. I feel the lord streaming through me like ultraviolet photons. He is loving as he buffers and adjusts saturation levels. It is my duty to understand his recondite ways. I am blessed to be alive, spiriting along this particular journey that allows me a chance to comprehend the lord’s mysterious ways. For this I give thanks.

Dark days are upon us. Oh woe is me. My concentration is waning. I am shackled to distractions. Every flicker is a new direction to head in, a new essence to partake in. I fear that God has chosen a faulty vessel in me. His displeasure is palpable. The Geico spokesman leers at me. His disappointment is tangible. Did the cavemen really invent fire? Should I be listening between Foghorn Leghorn’s lines? Bafflement overcomes me. I lie awake at night, my mind replete with abstruse questions. Does Elmer Fudd have trouble with the letter R? Christ. There really are no easy answers, I must confess. And, without doubt, I am struggling to keep my weary head from the deep emptiness of the great abyss. My plight is my own and everybody’s.

‘Be steadfast in your convictions.’ That’s what I keep telling myself. I whisper it below the TV’s hum. A mantra in the ecru light. Something that gives me courage and conviction. ‘Certainly, woodchucks will keep chucking wood. And former drill sergeants do make terrible therapists.’ I have come to count on these small, good truths.

Does God want me to do unto others as I would have done to me? Perhaps. But I’m beginning to lean more towards the idea that God is not only unknowable, but that God does not even want to be known. Through the slick good looks of that fancy-pants Geico spokesperson, God is merely telling me to zip it and mind my own business. I remain awed, even while grasping dreams of the Higgs boson to my bosom, finally hoping for explanations as to why treasures on this earth must have mass, while being miffed still by the inner workings of the universe, or God, as if those weren’t one in the same.

Oh lord God, how I want to see the light. Hallowed be your cathodic filaments and rasterized image, holy your smooth skin and hair anointed with pomade. Speak to me in your rich velvety timbre. I am baptized beneath the babbling brook of your leering charm, your mesmerizing head cocks, your Rod-Serling poses and your dramatic pauses. Seeing doesn’t have to be believing. Just as an “are” or a “was” toboggans into a “because” as the massless photons go about their electromagnetic business as usual, never spun but always spinning, lost in the tepid water of the world’s great bathtub. I shall scream your message from the mountaintops, or maybe just whisper it from the roof of a Wal-Mart or a Home Depot, while kneeling (of course) with hands clasped and head bowed near the sun-baked slate: “Insure thyself against calamity. The time is upon us. Do not be defined merely but what you like. Click thy cursor on life’s sunnier side, for now, and blow out the candles of somebody else’s birthday cake. Yes is always the answer. Yes. Yes. Rich is the way. Yes. And, well, yes to all that too.”

the dish ran away with the spoon (part 1)

2011-12-08T12:08:00.000-08:00

Olive’s fallen asleep next to me in the passenger seat. The seat’s all the way back. Out the driver’s side window the sunset is coned sheets of thin paper sliced through a gathering halo of clouds. A trickle of shimmered almost-yellowing light stains the pale hues of sky with the radiance of an undercooked omelette. I can’t stop looking at it. But somebody in my head tells me to keep my eyes on the road, and I swivel my head back and forth from road to sunset, and I can’t not look at either, and I can’t look enough. There’s the piquant edge of frustration scraping through my skull: something I enjoy and find distasteful at the same time. Somewhere, I am sure, somebody is singing for me, but not here. I click on the radio. A staticy voice is murmuring, “People who are against it don’t really understand why they are against it.” I laugh. I thumb the dial a bit, getting some Mexican radio stations, more static, and finally the gruff bleat and cracked whine of a country music song. It’s not good. I flick the radio off again.

The darts and stalls of traffic along the two-lane highway give jittery tones to my mood, and I chew my gum way past its flavor, tucking it under my tongue, holding it hostage for a brief moment, and then swish it back around in my mouth and chew some more. Olive’s been reading to me from The Book Of Job. But she’s way past the point of being too tired to keep her eyes open. I’m letting her sleep for now. I’m reaching that point of weariness too, that dizzy lopsided feeling that capsizes your concentration, makes your hands shake, and leaves you unbalanced and lint-headed. There’s an understanding that leaves little to say between us. We talk through what we can still, though, and there’s kelp left to wash ashore, still, too. I wonder if Olive dreams of cowboy-hat lampshades.

A signpost up ahead: Crows Landing. A flutter, wild. A scattering of wings, like cockroaches when the lights go on. I’m thinking of a murder of them so thick it blacks out of the sky. We have so little left. It’s all happened before my memory even existed. Counting helps, but it’s not a permanent solution. I bite my bottom lip. I scratch behind my left ear, nabbing a white flake of dandruffy skin. I am helpless and completely in control of the situation.

Sliding, and it is almost smooth and steady, from lane to lane, as headlights beam bright in the rearview. Hurrying is done with. I am slowly approaching the speed limit, here. Maybe a bump or two as I veer. And then, I straighten. A craned neck. The sunset’s diffused, a powdery specter that gleams in a soft bath and is spinning pixels and thousands of clear marbles, and I can’t take it in properly. Can’t get the right amount of it. Can’t make it stick so I’ll be able to tell Olive about it later. I keep trying. My eyes. Kept off the road. And on it, too. I am stuck.

Behave. It’s an earnest tickle. We don’t need electricity for stuff like this.

“Very much, it’s different, and spaces, this, well, we don’t need, and I want to tell you about this very particular thing that happened to me, once, this thing, it did, and more so, it will do, for now, to fit’s well and good, but you’ve got to, well, when you’re sleeping with jackhammers, you must pull the covers over your head, get some way, or find, I should say, find a way out, somewhere where you can be in charge of your own head, tell things within your power to control, things that’ve got not business escaping, to tell things, well, that you’re the one who’s keeping them in line, and it is you who will not be deceived. Yes?”

Olive shifts. It’s a whole-body twinge of dream. Her head rolls to the side, and her face looks disheveled and lost, her split and wiry strands of auburn hair spread like a placemat on the headrest. She bends her knees and brings her legs up on the seat with her, and now her body turns towards me on the side, and she slips both hands beneath her cheek. It’s almost like she’s wistfully staring at me with her eyes closed. It’s a sense I get. I don’t know how it happens. She rustles, adjusts the seatbelt over her, and goes back to splashing around in her soft puddle of sleep.

I am leading a cellophane-wrapped life. Very soon, and even now, some, I get to crossing myself without conviction. It’s a habit I’m trying to develop. Not often. I’m listening, though, and it is very serious, in here. Bottled only to be broken.

“We’re far from here.”

“It’s non descript. It’s reasonable. Flowers in the gas tank.”

“I’m finishing…”

“…your sentences for you.”

Sleep talking.

Farmland stretches into inconceivable distances. Even from above, they would be. Only shapes. Flat plots. Rectangles of slightly varied hues. A checkered pattern that fills more than the lozenge-shaped window will allow. From nearer, this way, it is still vast, flat, and you roll by it too quickly to get more than a glimpse’s stare of its reaches. The skidding, or more of a skim, over its surface leaves nothing but an ache for its space: something that seems at once open and binding, and a place that seems to offer the freedom of quietness, of being far from things without clogging another drain of who I might become.

Welds of there. Yes. Air dribbles in through the shut vents. I am somewhat not okay to steer. The tart stink of manure bowls over my senses, smarts me awake, for a second, and then it’s back to the drowse of drifting, unsteady and slow, on and off, blinking just to stay cognizant of the other vehicles arranged around me, blocking me in, and deftly maneuvering their way in and out and beyond where we all are, and never are all at once, too. I cannot rely on shapes. Telling is getting harder all the time.

“Olive. What are you doing?”

“Waking up.”

She stretches her arms out, straightens out on the seat, lays her head back, and yawns. It is a giant, eyes-closed yawn, and I love the way it makes her feel. The unfolding of previously crushed things. A blossoming.

“You’re up and at ‘em.”

“Yep. Up and at ‘em.”

We are radioactive isotopes in search of stability. We are the distance to the moon. I think about Elvis all the time. The universe is eternally inflating. This girl, my girl, she swears she won’t ever run away. The show’s gone on. We’ve all moved a stone’s throw from where we’d rather not be. My girl. I’ll play my clarinet while the moon fills the windows with things we’re too scared to dream of. I’ll take the wheel. My girl. Take it sweet or don’t take it at all.

“Pass on the left, please.”

“I’m not moved by this, by these, and we’re just objects too, you know?”

“Moving objects.”

“Objectionable objects.”

“Weld, weld, weld.”

“Cursive!”

A song on the radio. Blinked awake, not suddenly. The weight of atoms. The random luck of being alive. Things we don’t think about. The brake lights brightening as dusk lingers. The sun robbed of its powers. Violet horizons skewed with motor-oil nightmares. The chemical makeup of my thoughts, a chugged fuzziness, a distress signal skewed and gorged. And I let myself bathe in lethargy for a moment. Talking is just beyond my ability. Plugged into factory-made happiness. This isn’t the me I thought it was. We breathe slowly, carefully, and then hurry towards this peculiar bend in the road: flexed mediocrity.

“We’ve been loafing, right?”

“Sure. Something maybe pent up. Something that’s ruined the course without running.”

“Bullying, right?”

“No. Pragmatic as hummingbirds. Quick darts from here to another here, almost stationary, but not quite.”

“Leveled.”

“It might seem so. Like watching invisible particles collide.”

“A neutrino for your thoughts.”

“Well, as a kid I wasn’t allowed to laugh. It was restricted. I worked on it. I sat alone in my room and thought about what my laugh would be like. I perfected it through slow deliberation. I stripped the laugh down to its essential parts, its essence, and built it back up again during my teens. Somehow, now, I find myself squelching the urge to belch. Is this a mode of the same kind? I wonder.”

“Habits get the best of us.”

“The lord plays in mysterious ways.”

“Bah. Just like deep-forest green’s invading my dreams.”

“It’s all plain blah to somebody.”

“Uh huh.”

We’re stringing along through the state. Nose-diving into the shallow end of our past. I can’t relate to this plucky push of resilience Olive’s gotten the hang of lately. Or maybe it’s that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel a certain way, to measure out the importance of life’s derailed tchotchkes of thought. There’s so little of my life left that I get to share. I want certain qualities to remain important. If fits of mum clack sorted, this way or heavy, yielding famous results, and the afternoons go shallow, too, then surprises come packaged inside their own smallness, just different enough to make a lilt of boom in the difference of what plays regular with its own cause of, reasons to be, well, reasonable. Timed out, this hard-to-swallow now. Yes gets its favors from why, still, and I’m jostling around mud-flap troubles, bottomed towards heading blank, lean and sallow, whatever nowhere will take me in for this appetite’s while. If Olive’s playing loony, answering the shots, then there’s holiness in the glove compartment, or at least a holy-water loaded squirt gun, and the windows are steamed with loss, and we shove off lumbering with uncasted shadows, with where the hours go, with the plop of large rocks lobbed in a river, with the uncanny aftertaste of artificial sweetener, with the brisk chill of a dewy November morning trickling through our veins. I am anxious to be calm. She ties my guts on knots, this girl.

A pull of clouds, lengthwise incisions carefully stitched to fluff and scar a purpling whirl, the window roller’s handle scotch-taped on, and we’re slicing through it all cold as a subway token, faster than sleep, longer than the errors our mistakes make in the night’s tarry skin. Under and in. Wiped off like window-splat bugs. Very adroit, I tell myself. Almost lively, for a few minutes here and there. Of course, there’s always tomorrow’s coffee to think of, to look forward to, even if the weather of tonight endlessly gets the best of us. Could be a pang of regret gnawing the hazy blur of headlights that scatters my eyes. Everything pastels for a moment. A stretching out. A pixilated graininess that reminds me of the word “hover” for some reason. All the mush I’ve got upstairs, maybe that’s what it’s doing. Things I don’t want to tell myself, reminders of who I used to be, some bored guy pleading for attention that’s never enough. Hacksaws tearing the early morning into sheets of emptiness. Car alarms shrieking all through the night. My arms fall asleep all the time; my head never rests.

“I’m just trying, trying, trying to be nice. It’s not easy for me, you know?”

“You’re just pretending to try. That’s all. It’s not the same, you know?”

“There’s no way to tell the difference.”

“Some things you can just tell without knowing why.”

“A votary instinct for telling the manipulative ways of others, I guess.”

“I’m not that excited about these things, trust me.”

“Well, in the meantime, let’s just say I won’t be getting any speeding tickets.”

The speckled brown shades of cows are like camouflage in this landscape of wild grass and plains. A life of ease without luxury. A privacy made public. A way of seeing that is never seen. Chew. Nap. Fall in love. Get milked. Lie down on bent legs, supper bell rattling around a waddled neck, and rest more than easy. I drowse through it, chapped-knuckle fingers gripped tight to the wheel, making up landmarks in the passing scenery, making note of places I’ll only ever drive past, never into: Los Banos, Firebaugh, Lost Hills, Maricopa, Shafter, Kettleman City, Buttonwillow. My mind wanders. Marcel Duchamp. A urinal I once used in a small Chinese restaurant in Joshua Tree that was almost art, with a tinge of camphor.

“I want you to take me out to eat Chinese food in Iowa.”

“Iowa. There’s no place like Iowa for Chinese food. Iowa’s tops. The Chinese food there is legendary.”

“Please, please, please, please. Take me. I want to eat Chinese food with you in Iowa.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll let you beat me at checkers, and then we’ll swim in a heated outdoor hotel pool at night. No moon. It’ll be so dark, and we’ll watch ourselves in the steam misting up off the pool water, back floating, somersaulting underwater. And we’ll be nude, too.”

“Sounds grand.”

“Please, please, please. Let’s go to Iowa.”

“Motel Six?”

“Motor Inn.”

“Okay. To Iowa it is…one of these days.”

“One of these days.”

“I’ll bring my surfboard.”

“And we’ll get pedicures. We’ll buy movie tickets and stay in.”

“…”

“I’m glad this car’s our home.”

You go through life hoping, maybe even expecting to meet wonderful one-in-a-million people. Perhaps people famous for performing some exceptional art form. But you don’t. You just meet ordinary run-of-the-mill people. And you pretend your life is fascinating, and that you go out and do incredible things, spend your time lost in excitement, daring, always on the cusp of a new adventure. It wears thin. Look around. Look. There’s everything. The world doesn’t need to catch up with you. Nothing’s fallen behind. You are still there. You are.

I write postcards but don’t address them. They collect in a shoebox I’ve been keeping in the trunk. Mostly they’re pictures of Elvis at various phases of his career. I write things on the back like, “thought we were going to die today in a rainstorm. but we didn’t. so here we are in a motel 6, drinking beer, watching infomercials, and listening to the thud and whap of thunder and a vacuum cleaner banging against the wall down the hall. it’s not lonely here at all, though you think it would be, what with all this emptiness out here, the road’s landscape bleak and dotted every so often with grain silos and telephone poles, the occasional sparrow or deer, as your eyes hunt out faces in the clouds and your hands grip and slowly slip down the wheel, and your ankles ache from staying down on the pedal so long. it was like being pelted by iceberg shards, as if we’d driven into an exploding planet, and the windshield wipers were useless.” Elvis’s rendition of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face gets stuck in my head. I hit cruise control at 77 and start humming. Soon I’m belting out the chorus in a rich, deep baritone, and Olive is lying on her side, softly smiling at me, wrinkling her eyebrows, and her lips are curled in a purr. Our homemade sound is unique. It evolves daily, struggling to unfurl, to escape the prisons we build for it, while shrinking backwards all the while, all the way back farther than home, spending weatherless seasons on the mend, toothpicking its way through barbed wire and sirens, and if we give it half a chance, giving up too. Our silence sits between us.

Clearly, there’s no way around the way of this. The rest stops offer a small solace, a detour from the way of all flesh, and we meander, we hip-check God, and then go around sinking ships with off-hand remarks. It is a slow business, an aside mixed in the scraps of what we’d rather not say aloud. “For Customer Use Only.” That’s the stuff that we’re made of. Bartering is for the birds. We glide into parking spots, and stay stuck between the white lines for as long as their temporary shelter lasts. Coffee spit from a vending machine. A bag of pretzels unleashed, rescued by the mechanical buzz from a hoop-earring’s clutches, and dropped with a thud below a long, plastic, push-in door. We rub our eyes. Trees mingle with too-bright electric-yellow light. Somebody spits on the gravel to the sound of a sharp gesundheit. The special drone of 24-hour bathrooms. Truck drivers come and go with the buzz of a CB radio.

Olive and I are parting ways. It’s the sense I get, at least. She’s reluctant to argue about small things. And we only talk to distract ourselves from what we should be talking about: why there’s so much difference between the way things should be and the way they really are. A pattern gone haywire, purblind, porous and unkempt. It’s a hassle just to circle, and we’re nothing but straight lines counting the distance of these angular constructs we’ve fashioned out of loaned misery and rhubarb smiles. Love is a funny thing. Lasting isn’t even on its radar. It just goes until it stops.

“Canned laughter and dull knives.”

“Edgy and dull.”

“More of us, weaseling into each other’s worlds. I’m coldest in my fingertips.”

“My eyes get cold. And my nose.”

“Shore, shore. More things for us to shiver on about. Shore. Shore it is.”

“Ralph Meeker. Kiss Me Deadly. Gosh. Dead on. Really.”

“We get lost in somebody else’s life. Looking, exchanging perspectives, carving little pits out of reflections in the sharded marbles of the shinier things we’ve gathered from memory. Wasting as much time as we can.”

“Faking nervous breakdowns. Gathering, but never hunting.”

“So, there’s still a, ‘Hey! Look!’ quality to our misbehaving. The cars tilt at impossible windmills. The road wearies of us. Daddy’s little girl turns out to be a sex maniac, after all.”

“I’ve seen the fields of folks like us fold over and swallow hope. Simoleons gone astray, lost, or laughed away.”

“You remember all the things I want you to forget, and you forget all the things I wish you’d remember.”

“It’s too much for worriers like us.”

“We’re hemmed in by circumstantial vehicles on all sides. The world’s not saying a thing, but I still can’t keep from listening.”

“Overcast but never raining.”

Olive’s becoming more nocturnal all the time. I’m putting pressure on her to do things that should be effortless, and we’re both looking for new ways of defining who we are, to ourselves and to each other. Nobody can be their own object of scorn all the time. The spittle of us drools from rigid gapes; thatched together with sticky threads of boredom, we communicate with yawns.

“I keep asking myself, is this stupid or brilliant? It’s getting hard for me to know these things.”

“If we can’t be romantic.”

“Golly goshes to a crumpled how-don’t-you-do.”

“If we are closed to the weather’s open-faced hunches.”

“Lonely bastards abandoned to a hit parade.”

“I don’t ask myself the easy questions.”

“Chinatown tangos with me this time around.”

“A double-edged soul dwelling in a single body.”

“Cuss at the sky’s constellations all you want. Paying rent will still get in the way of dangling yourself free.”

“Bullhunkydory.”

Putting the map away. Making what’s left of haste. Dashes dotting a slight hiccup of the tires' now and then. We tread the circumstances of our being here, not careful, letting the contagious running of away infect us with the worst it’s got. Who knows what the de rigueur of these inchoate times is? We scratch our dreamless prayers into the breath of cottonwoods. That’s what there is to know.

“Clunk. Clink. Clack. Thrum. Drum. What’s it to you?”

“Less than a headache. I tell you.”

“Bush-league problems Baltimore Chopping through the felled trunks of our demise.”

“Colder.”

“Ham-sandwiching towards oblivion?”

“Freezing.”

“Air-conditioned souls mutter brief soliloquies in the un-baptized darkness where the less foxy parts of us dare to wade.”

“Almost dry ice.”

“Coffee?”

“…pull over.”

It’s the worst if you’re getting carsick on straightaways. You’ve got to realize these sort of things. Also, the radiator is leaking. I get lambasted by odometer nightmares if I don’t keep a steady speed. It’s now or never. King me.

We don’t notice ourselves getting older, older all the time. And it confronts you with what’s left staring in the mirror one day; what’s left of what you used to be; and you find yourself mimicking your own gestures, feigning comfort in your own skin that doesn’t feel like yours anymore, as if the body you once seemed to own was only leased to you, depreciating now into this barely manageable farrago of parts. An eye for a look. A tooth for a smile. I hug myself to keep warm.

We’re taking the longest of ways away from home. There’s no back to look at, but we crane our necks just the same to attempt to catch a glimpse. A bird decides enough is more than enough, and it dives (or was it pushed?) and thwacks against the front fender. It is a boom, a dull thud that is not like anything. My brain rattles. My eyes glue to the road, to the road, to the road. Everything is broken. There is nothing to be done. We drive on.

the lives of trainmen and stripteasers and telephone clerks

2011-12-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

same as this

was hard

enough to help

lost lower too

to step to

suspected one as

only’s or

and composed two

as bad’s timing

wears

a jury’s gaze

not paired but

stitched to more’s many

grandly bashful

if not carries a want’s still

or inexpert’s will

a hold bars all takers

different as that

vanished to stampless envelopes

honed with varying

but this try gives

an all’s heavier side

to let the least moment’s vast tug

get in the way

and

sidelined with concern

rationing tears

even bustards turn shy

empty and Glocked

sanctioned to be sad

or licked into being accidental

it wearies truth into charm

and kicks over loss’s harm

if lasting crumbles to go

where a crash suffices

to never know

the cold

of a long’s hurry

that’s run away

into being

a no

something catchy

2011-12-06T12:43:00.000-08:00

I am not Jay Gatsby. I am great, though. Don’t want to argue about that. I’m just not Mr. Gatsby. That’s what I want to be clear about. Am I Mr. Magoo? That’s another matter, and, if you can suppress your urge to compile gossip for your already replete stores of it, I’d rather not delve into those (or, as it were, these) things at the moment. So, so, so, so. Bear with me. Please. I implore you. It’ll be worth it. Promise.

Mississippi Fred McDowell was at my door the other day. He was shaking his head already when I answered. I opened the door, and I saw Mr. McDowell standing there shaking his head, holding his guitar out like a rifle. He wasn’t smiling. He sang, “Sir, my sir, well, you know, I’m not holding your baby’s hand tonight. Not tonight.” I invited him in. And he came into my home.

The wind was magic. It stripped everything bare. Howling was its business, outside. Not inside where Mr. McDowell and I were lounging. Maybe we were having tea. What’s the big deal about that, huh? I’m a credit-card-carrying citizen. I do my part. What’s it to you?

Sorry. That was unacceptable.

The wind defines things, shapes them, adds its own mindset to it all. These dusky days belong to the wind; we only borrow them with scuttling thoughts. It is parlous to do otherwise. Be gentle with me. I am not an astronaut, and, also, my front lawn is the greenest around.

Mr. McDowell and I lounged around and spoke to each other.

“Is it the first today?”

“No, it’s the last.”

“Very well. I am inclined to believe in such things. Things like this, or that.”

“Could I refer to you as Freddy Boy?”

“When?”

“About almost right now.”

“Okay-Dokay!”

“We adapt to things, like ourselves, as we age, and we grow into our bodies as we once grew out of a younger man’s clothes. Do you find this to be the case, Freddy Boy?”

“You mean as to say well it’s a case of my hands getting the shakes so bad that I can’t hold my coffee a-steady without spilling much more than a few drops?”

“I mean what I mean, on average. And it’s a mean that’s not angry a bit. That’s it.”

“Well, I figure I reckon it’ll leave me grappling with cuddled circumstances, fretless strums, and my head’s still along for the ride. Time grows wild inside of me. Time. Time. Time. Shit. I could forswear it all, but I ain’t got that kind of mouth on me. Not anymore. Being older doesn’t just creep up, sidle you like a stuffed mouth, swerve blankly about your footsteps, nipping at your heels. No. It’s a beggar washed of his tears, ragged with surprising jolts of what you were and what you’ll never be. My memories are panhandled to the nearest unworthy taker. Time to skedaddle away from it all.”

“Coffee?”

“Nah. Makes my tongue bitter.”

“Speaking of which…”

“Yes?”

“Oh, well, nothing. Stuff your shirt. Oh. Well. Care to sing?”

“Ah. Ha! Sure as Shinola. Uh huh. I’m goin’ a-ways darlin’. Honey, don’t you wanna go? Wash. Wash. Wash my trouble down, down, down. I knows my baby, and she surely don’t go treatin’ me a-alright. Hardly rest ‘til I shake, shake, shake ‘em on down. Uh huh.”

“Do you…do you…?”

“Yes.”

“Wait. But, do you, believe in…me?”

“For sure I surely do.”

“I’m spying on myself.”

“Death sleeps above the covers.”

“We live slow and die old.”

We drank tea. We lounged. We watched pigeons choose a mate. Freddy Boy laid his burden down. It looked rather like egg foo young on the copper tiles of my floor. We grew old faster with each passing moment.

Over the next hill some church bells tolled. Through my partially opened parlor window we watched a doorman in the building across the street swat at flies. A TV was on in somebody’s living room in that building, and we both squinted at it, trying to decipher the flickering, soundless images emanating from it through the fritted glass. We didn’t listen to anything except our own personal racket.

“I guess I’ll always be just a bored teenager in love, at heart.”

“Does that sum us up?”

“Particularly yours.”

“My what?”

“Your yours, of course. Do I got to speak-and-spell it out for you?”

“A scholar of paleography once pointed me in an ancient direction towards the current events of my consciousness. This, my friendly enemy, is an acquired distaste, and you are missing out on my more monkeyish behavior when you slide yourself beneath the layers of my understanding. Get it?”

“What’s mine is…something, I guess.”

“Wait. Did you mean, perhaps, something-dash-something?”

“No dash required. It’s not like a one-horse open sleigh at all. Feels just like the second time, the very second time.”

“Sure. Sure. Tell me something you know…or don’t know. Just tell me something.”

“Well. Get this. This one night, well, I needed a drink. I don’t mean needed. I mean wanted. I mean had. I mean went to the bar a few blocks down the hill and had a beer. I mean scotch. I had a small glass of scotch, neat. I drank the scotch fast. I was not the only person in the bar. I was sitting at the bar. I wasn’t mingling. I had started off needing a drink, and now I had a drink, and now I was drinking the drink. I was not drunk. I was fully capable of getting up and leaving on my own. I am not a drunk. I sometimes have a hard time standing. I fall often. I get these dizzy spells. I need a drink sometimes.”

“When one is under-slept one often reverts to beginning all one’s thoughts with that good old first-person singular pronoun: I.”

“Shit on that. Shit. Poop. Shit. Can’t they invent a pill to replace sleep? You’d just take a pill and it’d feel like you’ve had a good night’s rest. Why haven’t they come up with that yet? We’d all be so much more damn productive.”

A willow tree brushed lightly against the windowpane. It made me think of a feather duster being mistreated, the barbules worn-out, the former ostrich plumage torn and sad. The sound was harsh and unforgiving against the glass.

“There are no more somber cities. Places get devaluated. Then rents hike up. Then neon blisters the pavement. Then we strive to be ordinary. Then we parry and thrust with chopsticks. All that’s left is a curtailed mushiness that does much less than compensate us for living the lives that we’re told we should be living. Gosh God, I’d love to get my grubby mitts on some earthquake pills.”

“Another Hopalong Casualty. Hop, hop, hop a long. Rather…casually, getting the short end of the broadsword.”

“Think about it. Modern dispositions tend not to dwell on the curious cases of hats mistaken for hats. And husbands abound. We tell ourselves, ‘Be nice. Just be nice.’ But being curious, well, we go shit-silly with vacillation. We reclaim certain landscapes just to make them more our own, to bend them to our ends-- what seems necessary and unavoidable at the time.”

“Drink more hooch.”

“No way, my fine sir. It’s all pruno to me.”

“White lightning?”

“Not in the sweetest of senses could I lead this bewildered, occasional, that’s-all-my-fault, unsteady burp of a guy to the hunches and happenstances of the almost-great whisky-made-me-drunk beyond. Goddamn, you know, it’s obdacious! Isn’t it?”

“If it ain’t, it’ll do ‘til the real thing shows up.”

“I’m sure there are softer tones we can live through in the meanness of this season.”

Outside the trees were all whining about their predicament: twitching and fluttering on towards death. It seemed, if you looked hard enough, as if a few of them were giving us The Finger. I envied their lost leaves. I’m not sure how Mr. McDowell felt about it. He flapped his lips and almost hummed Come All Ye Faithful, but not quite.

Look, I am not joyful. I am not triumphant. I am merely working on a strategy to outwit the most derisive ganzfeld experiments of our times. Don’t look for me sleeping on the lawn. Don’t try to catch me stepping out for a smoke, clinking glasses with armies of idiots, or spatula-ing flies in the kitchen. I’m off the clock. It’s all come down to get-it-while-you-can’t productivity, and my mind wanders. The wind is steam heat.

“What would you sing for me if you were going to sing something for me?”

“Whiskey and water and sleeping pills.”

“Don’t be careless to care too much.”

“Man, just a thimbleful of rum will make the sorrows go on and haunt away some-a-where’s else. Any old-a-where.”

“A scratchy tune to sleep with for a while.”

“She’s my 44^th Street baby. She’s my hokey-pokey gal.”

We talked on and on while the trees trembled and quaked, almost annihilated by the ways of wind. Pity was dispensed to mankind, busily.

“I can’t go to funerals no more. I’ll get a wild case of the giggles. Almost anything will set me off. The eulogist’s accent, the strange shape of a mourner's face. I don’t know. A parasol opening. Really just nothing. And then it’s hide-the-smile time, hand-over-mouth, turn away, and all the likes and dislikes of it all. Nervous? Jittery? That kind of a thing? Maybe I’m just…shit. I don’t even pretend to have an idea about any of it.”

“Shoot. Golf dag-it! That’s what I’d say to it. ”

“Sure. Sure. Yessiree! Sure. Yep. Ah! Ha! To all ye gathered, beloved or no, here or below, well, sheet! I run my business out of a horse stable.”

“Interjection!”

“Well, buffalo my bill. I’m off to nothing. It’s…strange. You see, there’s a sloppy woman who comes into my store with asshole eyes and a bloodthirsty wince about her. She traps pigeons and sells them for meat to the soup kitchens. She makes me cry. Every time I see her, shit, it’s the waterworks.”

“Confusion’s the new sanity.”

At this point in our tête-à-tête, Mr. McDowell stood up. He pulled his guitar up like sagging pants over his belly, and he began to sing: “red’s the new read, better than rad, more awful than harpsichord scales, we are dashed off and rude, and our first kisses make everybody puke, there’s a typewriter next to a whisky bottle, there’s a hole in our tugboat, best’s the mess we made in this or what’s reading aloud, feet resting on a lobster-claw balloon, on a couch longer than the night, and a bus ride that’s always too close away, felled to drown, and we don’t need cigarettes, and we don’t need strangers, we’ve got the wind when it’s warm, we’ve got lots left in the tank, we’ve got trains, very’s the new how, almost as good as a wish that doesn’t make the cut, never cool, and always off cue, we’re training to take a year or two off, we’re helpless in our likes, but pleases don’t bother us, not as much as they should, gosh goes for dang’s jugular, and the seagulls play serious, for a west of no east that secures all the wrongs of what’s left of me and you.”

The sun wavered in its playful scouring of the horizon for a moment. I cracked my toes one by one. There was nothing else left to do or say. I began to wish for the mailman’s arrival. The complexities of my situation were drab and ordinary.

I am not Jay Gatsby. I believe in red lights, the humdrum past that hour by hour climbs behind us. It catches us now, and that’s what counts--yesterday we walked slower, huddled inside ourselves less…And on numerous stuffy evenings--

So I silently frown, back float with the riptide, dying onward once out of the future.

birmingham has gone to motors again

2011-11-30T10:27:00.000-08:00

The piano player in here is mysterious, and through the windows I can see the ocean. Everybody’s jotting. Notes are being taken, along with photographs of small children and animals. The ceiling’s creased with seams of meringue. I can discern the taste of jellybeans through the atmosphere, which is thick with card tricks and deep-fried tarantulas. Disfavor brooms the dust of staying put. Like weeds, my temper grows wild when left untended. The piano player is on to me. I try to daydream of voluptuous catkins getting screwed by the wind.

There goes another swiping scrawl of my hand, scribbling something about concrete gardens, outward of its own volition now, things beyond my reach, mud slopped between layers of hard work, and I’m slouching to stay as hidden as possible. This situation is becoming humdrum. My ears are all eyes.

Every fold is strumming. Paper is recherché. The waiters walk away from orders as records get fixed instead of broken. Be me. It’s not that boring or easy. Even at night it’s not like this: “Have at it all, moon! Hunch over that range of skyscrapers to the east. Peek away!” It’s not like that at all. Some things will boom before the light of day blues the crest of rage from them. Crashing? That takes the pie. Before I am done here, or after, the piano player will get what he’s got coming. Maybe I will whisper just soft enough so he can’t hear, “Roll before the bones break, buddy.”

Brightness, flooding in with sharp edges, steadies me. The windows are clean. All is clear. The ocean laps the hard sand. I am mushy at worst. Be kind. The piano player has taken a short break. Disruptions will make do. I will make them make do. Who plays the piano when the piano player has gone away? I am planked and deconstructed hourly, but am only paid per swindle. Nobody dwells in exceptions through clear-cuts like this, like mine, like a diaphanous swig of phosphorescence. Yes, I am bubbled so I can quietly scream, “Effervesce!” while being simultaneously jealous of the piano player and myself. But that’s not my conundrum to fritter away.

Lord, won’t you buy me a Lincoln Continental. Oh, but I am crude. Oh. Oh, and there goes a harmony scrubbed pure; it halts still as salt on the tabletop. I’m close to positive it’ll be negative for the salubrity of my thoughts. At least until the piano music continues.

Don’t spot the piano player. Let him dawdle without noticing it. You know what? He’s about as well-adjusted as a vacuum’s nozzle attachment. ‘Eyes on the consolation prize,’ is the warning I give. ‘Gas it when you’ve had enough.’ I know. Pray with me: “Thomas Bernhard was a good old pal of mine a way back when before it was correct to be incorrect.” Now, that’s worse if not better, yes?

The piano player strives. He will not be served. Not plattered. Not stuffed or suppered on. I think, ‘Dexterity mashed with celerity is his game.’ I am hunched, sitting at this table, over my paper, letting my hand scratch out its business. The piano player has magnificent hands. Me? No. Mine do not glide effortlessly over the ebony and ivory, plashing a tad here, smooth, fluent, grand, marvelously adroit, almost a liquid grace to it all. No. My own paws, like talons a tad, are better for clubbing, cracking ribs, lickety-splitting, handling crotchety levers, scaring kids, oafing gestures, milking ibex, and pulling triggers. The piano player knows the score. Nobody draws conclusions like me. But for now, I am keeping the paper covered. My elbows are on the table.

While the piano player was gone I made up a song: “Claw, claw, claw out my eyes, for me. They are not gauzy with you anymore, no more. So do me a solid, and claw, claw, claw away.” I am scraped. Another note: make landfills more exciting. Are you (me) cruel? Will yesterday’s makeup cover another folky disaster? Well’s well. These here fleas that are too lazy to crawl emote with such stuff as, “Give me misery or give me life! Ah, banisters they crumble, and we’ve got salt to shake; we’ve got sand between our toes; we take dream-vitamins crushed in dog-food souls.” The song’s distant, pitched to go, and I will cower here over my paper, sit at this table, here, and I will know the form my enemies take before I even start humming.

At another table, one not far from my own (at mine I am the only one who sits), are seated three ladies. They are dressed in the checkered red and black of lumberjacks-- two in ankle-length plaid dresses, one in a plaid dress shirt and jeans-- and are drinking tea while munching on graham crackers. The one in jeans (and I can tell this) wants to ask quite loudly, “Would somebody critique pure reason for me?” But she doesn’t. She merely munches on crackers and sips tea while rocking slightly in a diagonal pattern from the shorter back left leg to the longer front right leg of her unbalanced chair. I want to awaken her from her dogmatic slumbers by telling her things like, “It is quite dangerous being a pedestrian out there on the streets in these modern times. You could be creamed to a pulp by any number of careering motorized vehicles.” I am living a food-stamped life quashed by military-style forces who surround my ambitions with chewed gum. But, in the end, I believe the piano player will cure us of our a posteriori ways. That is what he is for.

Here is another is: a stint of reducing barely visible moments to their stripped-down essence, almost soundless too, and I get the theme song from MASH stuck in my head. I lie to myself that my nose isn’t growing as I age. Breathing, for now, keeps me steady. Enemies? Unknown. Friends? Dashing. Always dashing. There are, you see, dull knives that slash jaggedly at rational forms of knowledge (some gained, some released), and rip janky holes through my inferences of small matters. Nobody plays nice around these parts. The goodness of one’s actions cannot be measured out in coffee spoons. Act slow. Think quickly. Operating on stun is stalling what’s inevitable. There is not room enough here (in this is) to shake a fist at. The eagle has lost its sight.

The ocean beyond the window’s plate glass is not calling me. The tables are turning out to be used against my better operational modes. I am out of opinions, sided out, breached and disquieted. My sheet of paper has no room left. Gazes are looking the other way. Scuttled whispers come coughing, bargains galore, through diacritical perceptions of who is left to ponder what goes on inside this dusty head of mine, murmuring such things as, “Professionals only, boys. We write our own tickets to hell. Amateur hour is expired. Come on. It’s later than now. Get a move on. We play in borrowed time, only.”

The piano player is gunning for me. A breach of steam-powered etiquette. But I won’t laugh first. It’s better to be mashed by a delicate frustration than be the cheek-turner of the party. Shoot first. That’s a heavy bargain. To shoot last would be preferred.

Blam.

Mighty Mouse Marooned After The Hesperus Has Wrecked

2011-11-06T11:48:00.000-08:00

Hello my cordial darling. It was a has of many rains since the streets soaked away with us. None of me is stolen now. Opening, more likely as closed. Yes. About the birds too, and how summers fell to verbingly contest right’s popularity in wrong’s nouned contest results, and how now cape-less mice and their once pure-of-heart companions scamper and zigzag from crumb to crumb instead of taking flight, leaving to lose the night, footed out to ill situations, never about just whose who shirks this informal duty, yes, pearled too. There it was not heard of and said just differently the same. More about news is that here we have those cloudy times of drip without drop, those clearer-skyed miseries that pull the plush of one nearer from the far reaches of gathering storms. The us of you flashbulbs until it no longer lights my days, as weeping longs for its own demise, far and here, as you-- of the tidier sort-- know almost well. Cursed? Cerealed? Oh no. Brigaded upon doughnut-less seas. Not that showers do any of their own gardening. A mime’s swoop (hard to call it a phrase) portends other coats, or coasts, marbled or smeared. Am I thinking of honey congealing near a mug’s bottom, awaiting the steaming-hot poured lather of brandied water? Am I false of head? Hearts would tell less. I know. I am weak in these scales of socially acceptable failings (though my knees are true and steady). Don’t skin your happiness. Don’t depend on raisins. It is good grape time, in the city. Fields of copper. Cocktails for one. We are flowered and rivering. Tighten the hold we had on you, the me of it, the us who split town late. And yes, stay out of bed all night, short on kinder over-it-alls than those that held our nightmares for ransom in a pickle jar, or was it olives? I’m misty with peanuts. My scalp is oiled by snakes. Slack is the only cut that my will doesn’t desire. Far out done, if it were a was, a how, a grumbling backdoor parlor mood, if it were snoozed with buttoning up the best of being down-- worse though, if class could count itself. (Ha!) I am not jimmied to landfills (at the moment), and I regard strangered looms as sunk islands I once deserted from this here-to-there perspective. A little on the masculine side headed in a feminine direction, you shook it all out, and down we rose. (This, of course, is, and never was, of course, a holdup.) Welded will do. It will smooth you, and we take it, right as road maps. Crueler motes, I’ve never lost, gently stilling their own shushed hurt, dusted. Creatures? I’ve got my own just for a habit, for a something that does or does not-- starring a start’s numb hush, as it weren’t. Bowed to floor me with a sun-flecked address. Sure. Sure, that’s what the slickered suit & ties do, here without the windy to pull or tug around, skylined through paraded horizons. East becomes mowed. West is doom. North shrinks from the south. A moon’s ring’s gold is lashed to to-morrow’s masthead. The fog-bell’s distance is untolling. We are our own tidy, handheld regard. Land the o’er of music in a fill of me-first/you-never. Placard my sentiments to no ends, to no known now. And, and, and, and, yes, cart off without it tagging along. A circle wrought with too few many-wayed destinations. Also, there is an Absalom in my pea soup.

the only way down from the gallows is to swing

2011-10-27T23:32:00.001-07:00

I wonder what person it will be who answers my phone, in the garbage time of my life, when the spandreled busybodies flex their muscles and give a bad show of what their worth is, as far as isolation’s company and caring capacity goes. Intuition’s anti-populist message? Well, insects, around here, they say at least (and they say it a lot), don’t count. Like saying, “Howdy, Clarice. Could you pick my nose for me?” That’s the good part of the bad news. The bad part is that my hair’s gone distinctly east for the winter. Look. There are grains of having, pinches of sugar, tent flaps zippering up, or, “Get some fucking sleep already!” to be shouted from across a kitchen’s distance. Nothing that starts right seems to end that way, or a Columba livia or two to shit all over it makes it seem that way. I’ve had enough of the seamy side of seems though, and so let’s open up the cages and let the domesticated run free. See how far they get. Greed steps in, sure, all black-eyed and powder blue, and I’m pissing in the rain again. Signs point out their own signals. Though through candy-apple glazed eyes Beirut’s calm this time of year. Golfing for meals means a who-picks-up-the-tab before it’s putting time. Button-down swim trunks, all of a kind, and threats are just holes in the roof, and I don’t mean insulation from the barbs of pie thieves. I’m settling on and in. Groomed to unkind when necessary. Going back away. It’s steam driven, my will to make a sucker out of myself, and it is greedy when likable, hard to figure when leaving the eyes easy, and I’m paid in bronze for keeping the stables dirty, dreaming my business, never quite par for the world’s course. Curved about a letter, wheeled under a swaying bridge, chewed to bits, ratified under a tattered banner of cowhide. This time’s coming up next, away farther than gone.

Well, those days are gone, and so is she. The sunsets here are like something being soldered, a melting, creamy drippings of lava, vivid, all red and gold. Hues of who I was blur, and I am hope-mad, starved to a stuttering silence. Getting any delusions out of my craw from here on in, ending from scratches, starting towards a manner of not speaking. Things are just getting to be usual, to be off and on my mind all the time, which, it just so happens, is a-alright with me.

“Paradise is just up ahead. You can’t see it yet, but don’t worry; it’s there.”

Wonder is catching up with me. Hooked nails gather on the sidewalk. The waft of dessert makes me say things like, “We all hold these doughnuts to be other-evident evidence.” Nobody buys a new car around here, and the tap water stinks of yesterday’s Chinese food. Very up-to-date recollections are on the wane, too. Sure, I wash my hands thoroughly after taking a leak, but lord knows what grime’s sullied my soul in impossible-to-reach places. “Stash a grand or two. Get your own luck and make it.” I’ve said that before. To whom? Don’t rightly know that I’d care to remember, even if I could. Even if it’s sunny, we’ve all been talking about the weather for too long.

The cables don’t get through. Basics never get taught. A coin sells itself. Before the war we loved fake rain in old movies and sticks of chewing gum, the sound of doing dishes. Now there are afterthoughts to be considered. Have we become sad, boring people who talk to each other from across the table because they have to? Is there even a “we” to consider? Love is just a phase people try to spend their lives going through. The whispering of heinous villains trickles through the cottonwoods. Feathers fall or turn to stone. I am willing to be ambivalent. I am willing to be phased out.

“Services rendered before the time of payment will be considered likely and circumstantial until the payment is received, at which time the owner will be charged for operational fees plus any remaining balance of life force left.”

Erring on the side of dawn closest to home, closest to spider country but farthest from the ear-buzz of mosquitoes. That’s what keeps me competent. Not sane, but competent. Richer than tear drops. Happier than rain. It’s a move-it-on-out business, and I’m prepared to gargle for my meals. My neighbors are luckier than they’ll ever know to be situated by the likes of me. Paper towels? I wipe up what’s left of my courage with them, and then go out and buy more. Bum deal? Could be. If there’s trust in smaller things, things unable to imagine even a breadbox to fit into, then I’d say it’s lassitude at its finest. Gas it up only to crash and total the whole deal with a full tank. Nobody worries as long as the Swear Jars get their share. I stay fashionably behind.

The moon’s wearing its slouch hat at a rakish angle again. I’ve seen worse. Got to cop to it, or out of it as well, sometimes, when the sky gets this way. Clouds bursting into stringy threads, tangled inchoate wires going nowhere, fluttering, shedding their substance, flaking off into a grape-tinged bowl of swirls and tangles. Sometimes it’s all I can do just to staying floating inside my own skull.

Vespers. Night turns itself in. We were all tuckered out and tucked away on a small farm in a small town in the south of France when I told her, “I’m giving you all the benefits of every doubt, but the benefits are running out.” The smell of sour bug spray and incense, the creaks of warped wood floors, and we existed on parallel lines of thought, we survived on light snacks and ginger beer while the ceiling slowly fell all around. I saved fortune-cookie messages that hinted doom in my shoes. Before there was time to count the stars, to repair the pulleys and springs of love, to hot-wire forgiveness and take it for a spin. But now we drain sap from the chained birches of what we’d rather not remember so well. I kiss my inhibitions goodbye, and I thank nobody, careless and below it all, from Spanish gold to coats of yellow dust, as fresh as last month’s milk. There’s a notch above where we’ve been, but scores don’t keep, so close all invitations, they tell me, until the seals bark their way back home; and complications arise all the time. We are not prepared for the past, for what it’s done to us, for what it’ll still do if we let it, like this, backpedaling, rummaged and near to ruined as we try on lamplight for size and exit from the only entrance we’ve got left. It is not a motor’s sputtering clutch-grab start, not the frowny temper of my fear, not left behind or up ahead in the wilderness; and we seal off the path of least resistance so it stays almost holy while we wait for unwanted guests to trample all that we thought we’d left behind. I’m going northwest for the winter.

The flutes and banjos perk up over the tubas; violins screech and scrape; whistles call out for more; we kick up dust. The trains? They run close to late most days. I miss our front yard. The smooth lichenous boulders, Napoleon brandy in the afternoons, strolls among the fish burped to concrete life in the fountains spewing chlorinated water in lazy arches. We had dirt paths, old men on a meticulously groomed lawn howling at bocce ball while we dined on sardine pies and shark-eye minestrone. Clocks were chiming all the way down the lane as the cranky marionettes performed CPR on the crane operators. Bad breath held court. We had chances to not escape; we had raw meat to digest and flowers in the basement; and it was subtle how we made time for dancing. Very little now is left of what we once knew so well. The last tattered, teary bits of song flutter and fall, and we dive beneath the rug to stay warm but never safe.

Telling how the day went wasn’t always so hard. “Waiting on outcomes to change, getting strung along, the surface doesn’t change, but I make up for any discrepancies with guilt and moping while smothering peanut butter on bacon. I’m not going to wait around here pandering to somebody else’s emotional state. Winning’s lost on me; nothing is returned. It’s an operational standstill, stuck and never to be started again.” Then you get caught up, perhaps, fanning yesterday’s fire from the high ledge of a tall building. Hall’s empty. You’re never here when you should be. Bed’s unmade. This face won’t do nothing but frown. So, count my luck in tickets I’ll never sell, a pair of legs that’ll never get back to the sea, and a girl who’ll never come on back home to me. It’ll never add up to what it always was before. Give me a shove. I’ll drop my hat and plead the fifth. It’s a take when all you need’s a give. Push back? I’m way down below empty, and the glass is smashed, and my name’s nothing but a swamp to hover over until a big nasty insect comes along and finishes off what’s left. The phone. The phone. The phone has given up ringing for good.

the smell of purple (an exercise in stenography)

2011-10-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

(The meeting of fledging millionaires was taking place at precisely 9:34 am in the Difficult room of the Easy Does It Palace. No sabotage was attempted. A reclusive mourning dove took a shower in the rain while perched on the palace’s outer bronze gate. The inner bronze gate was bird free.)

Any day now. Any day now.

We run through the gazes of whole-milk variances. Stuck in alto, ruined through a cappella, adducing what we’re likely to find in copper skillets-- nothing cooks, though-- here whiter than sky. "Have at it."

You tell me, “Running is rampant.”

I think, ‘We, we, we.”

In this similar spot of telling, we both go for rich, undulating in the least fashionable way. Go about your playfulness. With treaties to never sign, differences resigned to be the same, we slurp sunflower juice from lichenous mugs.

“Leave me together.” There. You left it never rolled and always rocking. Laterally, there’s something to stay right for a while. “Cussed out.” Yes. There was that, too, as well as also. “Bend down the branches, baby.” It’s singing. It’s that. It’s groveling for a stretch. “‘Able to’ is the most of ‘cannot’ in otherwise fair foul play.” Okay. Lay it on me, bumpkin. That’s a gleam without a shine, a shine without a sword to fight with, a lake with no pines, a river raft gone down, down, gone. Same’s a shiver. Send it back, back, back; “No!” Back.

Go brown. Go Septemberish. Bids start at nickel and ten.

Most months then. More years for a while.

Visiting graveyards, graves too, without spitting. All fessed up. Go around. Get without it. An opening, and there, to look, to see through, into, about, as it gets early, and leaving is scrawled in the dead leaves.

Lured and liked, that’s us. Grown down? Dressed five to nine, only, so to not say, it gets rather easy to implement, sans a face slap, what’s mattered more than this, or less than that. All that remains is a ton of bad mints to swing stringless racquets at, pine-needle tea stains on the place mats, and delirious cut-less veal squirming for attention among the used coffee grounds. Riding less than easy, harder than planned past.

All leftovers should be consumed within 39 days and nights of first attempt at consumption.

We are, “warped and hazard free.” Our, “you know,” is nothing to get caught down in, sappy about, or afflicted with like mice trained to wear dentures without ever drooling. “Pat me on the front.” That’ll be just fine. “Cram!” I mean, “Scram!” That’s all.

They learned to hover well, those gnats, and, “More or less where or when that came from or went to,” was turned to mush before any of us here or there caught wind of it. “Messy obtains crucial oversight.” That’s none of what she wrote, most of what she didn’t say, and about a third of what’s happening right about then. “Now!” We can no longer live without toothpicks.

Famous for being unknown, leveling on to glib’s demeanor-- with a proud penchant for banana-happy Romeos, the licked aftertaste of stamps, and a drifter’s gumption for noncommittal silence-- the more obtainable among the seated rose to, “speak below a whisper. Content, aren’t our minions of faithless saddened boos?” Watery nosed, and then, “You bossed around those booing ones, and now?” Intermittent eternity puts on its gloves in the springy fall of deuterium monoxide and spars with drop-dead medium-classy hearts while under the influence of a gallon jug of table wine. “There’s a low-'unlevel'-salary sort of paycheck spasm for you. But who needs signs of dollars when the yen to ache’s being sold off for less than inspiration’s transitional paradox?” Above? “We’re still not hungry.” In medias res. Ab ovo. Post tenebras lux. It’s an adding to subtract what’s left of multiple divisions that never equal a fair share. “Score!” We’ve tasted worse: “Better?” There’s a catch without a number assigned to it yet.

Warnings are butterflies.

“There’s a vehemence to your conjecture, sir. I, and, I, and, I, and,” ahem, “am not so sure without it.”

“Better yet?” It’s grainy in the afterthought of life.

“Pancakes for dinner? Again?”

“Yes was the first no.”

I do; I do. “Then,” I don’t or won’t. “Then?” I will or should or cannot, too.

“A bag for your garbage, Miss.”

“That is Miss S, to you.”

“Trees have better things to do than make money.”

Taking care of steel prices, contingency plans for concrete lobbying that was taking the place of bridge building for the winter, boats taking cruises in circles-- “Taking leaves options given towards staying.” Put it up, wrecked but not ruined: an institution for intuition, hardly.

“We are not insensate rubber blocks,” although paying ill, “to traffic through and about until there’s a revision to the light-refraction dynamics of handouts in the plausibility of estimating today’s returns staying put.” No defense to ever rest. “Go build idea machines, dissect normality into display-case dreams, and,” after, after, “get a stay off it!”

It never gets dark or cold enough. The ground plays alive. Wallop around in the sty of it all long enough and the stench becomes pleasant and reassuring. A voice isn’t enough without music to believe in it. “Enough!” Sure.

Raw creeps into morning’s blush. “I am hunching.” Bow-tie the thieves. Nobody recognizes Hunchers. “We’ve, here, now, got to,” you know, “believe in creeps.” The laundry is trash. “Candles are waxing from chandeliers, and we’ll go under, knocked keister-first into unfortunate wealth, and,” drip, drip, drip, “there’ll be no new tax on refinement or never-sundered wear.”

Inspiration’s plugs are bent by buzzing television the color of dead sky. Channels are staying the same. “And now to trace, heavenly, with due process, the course back to the irregularities of scheduled programming…”

Stay oblivious. Smell the Statue of Liberty’s armpit and see if despair will take care of the rest. Remain neutral. Raise the rent on longing. It is well to keep secret the hooded croaks of your desire.

“Take it all off!”

“Already?”

Say, “yes,” to deplorable options. More bankrupt fruit exists. “Candy?” Deceitful. “Rubric gets the job,” done.

Now’s enough.

anxiously awaiting the return of topcoat weather

2011-10-07T12:07:00.001-07:00

a: Look at that.

b: Bonsai tree.

a: Up on the balcony.

b: Yep. Put on the ledge.

a: Way up high. Twenty stories?

b: About that.

a: Damn high up there. Different weather at that altitude.

b: Yep. Maybe some atypical condensation. Good for the tree.

a: Keep it wet. Like a mist. A spray.

b: Sure. Gotta keep them trees moist so they don’t dry out and die on you.

a: That guy’s got it pretty good up there, huh?

b: Could be a lot worse for him.

a: He’s way the fuck up there. Nosebleed stuff.

b: Yeah. Up there like that. Imagine moving in.

a: Hauling all that furniture up to that deluxe apartment in the sky.

b: But I’m sure there’s an elevator.

a: That’d help. Still. Hell of a move. Not for pansies.

b: Hire movers. They’ll do all the sweaty shit.

a: Maybe this guy, maybe he goes out there on his balcony late at night. Maybe he sits there and smokes and looks at his bonsai tree, looks at his view. Must be quite a view.

b: Yep. Lots to see. All those lights. Gold and yellow and white. The bridge. The bay. The sky. The whole dreaming immensity of it all. Traffic puttering away down there between the houses. Headlamp light. Brake lights. Red and white. Buildings bruising the horizon.

a: Plush. That life. Not too shabby of a way to be doing your living.

b: Yep. That guy probably ain’t got it too bad.

a: Not like us.

b: Nope. Not like us.

a: Look at us.

b: Us?

a: Yeah. What do we do?

b: We stand and talk.

a: We shiver in the cold. We smoke cigarettes down to the filter.

b: We’re nubbers.

a: Yup. Always got a nub between our fingers. Holding our shoulders.

b: Freezing in the wind. Breathing so you can see it.

a: Lots of time he’s got up there.

b: Up there all he’s got is time.

a: Down here all we’ve got is class struggles.

b: Looking Classes.

a: Those?

b: Sure. Like when you see a girl, and you’re not too scared to talk to her because you think she’s in a lower Looking Class than you.

a: Looking Class. Like that.

b: You’re above her. She should be thankful.

a: She should be down on her knees.

b: Intimidated by your dashing charm and good looks.

a: A man she’d never imagined would ever talk to the likes of her.

b: Yep. You can take charge. Don’t got to put yourself out there too much. Not much risk. Just a toe tap.

a: But if she doesn’t bite?

b: Well. Then. Yep. That’s bad. That’s the worst.

a: She’s rejecting me?

b: Yep.

a: Shit. She should be grateful.

b: Down on her knees.

a: I’m the one should be doing the rejecting.

b: Damn straight.

a: I’m the one slumming it.

b: Who does she think she is?

a: She’s nobody.

b: Girls can be so damn picky.

a: They’ve got their sights set. They know what they want.

b: But do we?

a: No. We don’t know shit about what they like.

b: We know what we like.

a: Of course. Everybody knows what we like. That’s easy.

b: They know what we’re buying.

a: But what they’re shopping for?

b: Nada.

a: One of life’s great mysteries.

b: Yep.

a: We stand and shiver. We blow smoke.

b: We get tired of ourselves. We chuck cigarette butts at pigeons.

a: This is living.

b: Yup.

a: Flick the glowing orange ends, make tiny sparks fly, pass the time.

b: I don’t want much.

a: Don’t get much.

b: It’s all we’ve got, though. And you gotta admit, it’s flowery sometimes. Sometimes it’s gold.

a: Damn straight. Weather the bad to bathe in the good.

b: Yep. Life’s a goddamn miracle. Live it like you mean it.

a: Seriously, play for fun.

b: The rain comes and goes, and for sure, yeah, the cold wind blows from time to time, but we’re here, stuck in the middle of it all, and we’ve got less, sure. But, shit, we’ve got more too, right?

a: Yep. More’s more.

b: What about that guy? That guy way up there with his bonsai tree?

a: That guy? He’s got his hard times too.

b: Rough stuff, now and again.

a: Sure. Maybe his dog died last February. His mommy might’ve beat him up when he was a toddler.

b: Some girl done him wrong.

a: Could be. What do we know?

b: We’re just a couple of nubbers standing around in the cold, holding our shoulders, blowing our nose. Who are we?

a: Working stiffs. Plebs without much chance. Just some jimmies on a pile of ice cream.

b: But the ice cream’s tasty. It’s got a good chance, right?

a: The ice cream? It’ll do okay. It’ll be alright.

b: Look at that thing.

a: Bonsai?

b: Yep. So high up there. It’s doing fine. It’s making it.

a: It’s scraping things together as best it can. Not too shabby, up there.

b: I bet.

a: Catching colds and throwing out yesterday’s news.

b: Pissing underneath a sign that says, “I ain’t got no name.”

a: Shit. More like, I ain’t got a dime.

b: My woman. My woman. Yep. She sure as hell won’t leave me none alone.

a: No more. No more. Nope. Never been so all alone.

b: My song’s all I got left.

a: Broken down hungry 5,000 miles from home.

b: Yep. We’ve got the cockroach-black sky at night. We’ve got knees to pray on. We’ve got guns we’ll never shoot. And then, well shit, our boat’s gone and sprung a leak.

a: The rats are jumping ship.

b: Should we too?

a: Nope. We’re here for the long haul.

b: Damn. It’s all we’ve got.

a: Yep. But that’s enough.

b: For a couple of nubbers like us.

a: Sure.

b: I get the shakes so bad sometimes.

a: It’s par for the course. It’s the residue from being alive like this, in this way, like we are.

b: Soap scum on the tiles gunking up the works of being me.

a: Yep. We all get jumpy here and there.

b: Scared and anxious. Waiting for something, you know? That feeling that something’s just around the corner. And you keep walking down these spiral stairs trying to get at it, but it’s never there.

a: Just close enough to be too far away.

b: But you can’t stop walking down, and you get farther than you’d like to be underground, way down there, and you keep thinking, ‘It’s just right there, right around the next bend,’ but it keeps not being there.

a: Chasing and never catching.

b: That’s life.

a: Always just an almost away from where you want to be.

b: And we dream of better days just up ahead.

a: Sure. Better times. We’re sure of it. Almost there. Any day now.

b: There are limits. These things are in the act of balancing, you know?

a: Maybe. I do and I don’t.

b: Maybe.

a: There was a time, you know, when I was wearing the same suit jacket every day.

b: I remember it. Yep.

a: It had a rip in the shoulder…

b: Uh huh.

a: and that rip kept ripping larger, and the lining was hanging on by a few threads. I’m not sure that there was anything magical about it, but it felt like it sometimes. Anyway, I was used to wearing it, and without it on I felt exposed and lackluster, like I wasn’t myself. So, there you have it. I wore the thing way past wearing out.

b: Everything’s got to wear out sometime. Can’t hold on forever.

a: The passing’s what all things must do.

b: Can’t grow a new now in a here that’s always gone, always changing into a then.

a: Wait. How big you think one of them trees can get?

b: Bonsai? Don’t know. Not too big, I’d figure. Always see them rather on the tiny side, you know?

a: Yep. Miniature trees. Like midgets. Wonder if any of them ever get really big, though. Like some mutant ones. Imagine, giant bonsai trees, a forest of them, like redwoods. That’d be something.

b: Sure would. Don’t reckon it too likely. There’s a good reason, probably, that they’re so small. That’s the way they do best.

a: Their best shot at making it in this cruel, cold world of ours.

b: Uh huh.

a: And us?

b: Two guys like us?

a: What’re we going to do?

b: Anxiously await the return of topcoat weather.

a: That’s what we’re made for. Enduring. Getting by. Sticking it out. We abide. We survive on other people’s scraps.

b: What they throw away.

a: Huddled here, scrapping our shoes back and forth on the sidewalk, spitting in the street, making it the only way we’ve got.

b: We know how to get through the days.

a: But the nights?

b: The nights? Well, that’s too much, even for a couple of nubbers like us.

a: Trolls sucking up air. Farming out our souls for the right to live the way we do, day to day, week to month to what he hope is another year. And then…

b: And then.

a: What’re you going to do? A guy like you or me? We’re stuck being ourselves.

b: But that guy, way up there with his bonsai tree, think he’s got a chance?

a: That guy? Hell. That guy’s got no chance. None at all.

b: He’s way up there.

a: Yep.

b: Above everybody else.

a: Sure.

b: And he’s looking down.

a: Right.

b: And he’s thinking that maybe, just maybe…

a: He’s giving it quite a bit of pondering.

b: It’s not worth it, all alone, up above it all like that.

a: Perhaps.

b: With that bonsai tree crumbling in the chill of winter wind, and his dead dog, or his woman who treats him bad, or the skylight in his ceiling that doesn’t quite give him a glimpse of god.

a: Could be.

b: And maybe being down here, in all the muck and hollering madness and free-for-all horseshit that makes up our daily lives, well, maybe it just starts to seem to him…

a: Yep. Down below’s where it’s at, and he’s long gone from it.

b: But he can’t get back down. It’s not so easy once you’ve climbed up so high like that. There’s only one way back, maybe, and it’s a much more direct route. Maybe he start’s to think he’s only got one way to go from there, and it’s a long, fast fall.

a: A falling through to the bottom. One final plunge.

b: A leap from faith to cold, hard fact.

a: Happen just like that. Like pigeon shit.

b: Maybe it comes to him that being up there’s worse, you know. It’s only like he’s making believe that he’s got it so good. The weather still arrives from the same place. Comfort only feels nice for so long.

a: And then it’s too much dessert and not enough meals.

b: Stuck.

a: Yep.

b: Up there. So far away. So tiny. So useless.

a: What’s the point? Right?

b: I don’t know. Maybe he’s just sad enough to be alright…to be…happy.

a: Fuck. I don’t even know what the hell to say to that.

b: Yeah. It’s freezing out here. Shit. I’m going back in.

a: Me too. What’re we doing freezing our asses off out here? They got the heater on in there. Shit.

b: Just a couple’a nubbers.

a: Shit. Not going to argue with that.

might as well live

2011-10-05T23:01:00.000-07:00

My guess would be that he was from somewhere in Central or South America. I know. Real specific. But he’s going on, rather animatedly, about guitar playing. Acoustic. Electric. I don’t know. There was a substantial enough language barrier to reduce us to the use of simple nouns and verbs. A lot of, “What’s that?” and repeating things louder and slower. The cab’s not being driven at a comfortable clip. The guy’s weaving and taking his hands off the wheel, emphasizing things he’s saying with these wild semaphore-like gesticulations, and keeps making wrong turns, and this one time he like comes up real close to this bus that’s like taking up a lane and a half, and he is trying to squeeze by it, but can’t, you know, because of traffic going the other way. And so the bus stops to let people on and off, and this guy’s like right on the thing’s ass, and he starts going off, or on I guess, about buses and how much he hates them and how they take up so much space, and stuff like that. It’s weird. I don’t get it. Anyway. He keeps asking me for directions, and then keeps not taking them, and we’re going all nine ways from bananas over the city. I had my seat belt on. I wasn’t worried. So, he’s got this burly mustache, which is pretty greasy looking. A lot of spittle probably collected on it from his weather-not-the-news elocutions. Maybe it was sweat. Any why’s what, we’re bumbling along like that, his eyes not on the road as much as they should’ve been, and he’s jabbering about music, and he’s getting all excited about piano playing, and he’s like showing me how he plays, very soft or extremely violent-- “bang like percussion,” he says, while his hands are off the wheel for-- what I deem to be-- a dangerous amount of time. So, I’m like, ‘Whoa, fella. Get them hands back at two and ten there. Please.’ He’s mad for talking about music, this cabbie. I’m trying to keep my eyes peeled for turns he should be making, and at the same time trying to have this makeshift conversation with him, nodding and responding and having to pay much more than a bargain rate for attention to what he’s saying because his accent and bad English are making the guy a bit difficult to follow. Once in a while he’ll ask me where we’re going, and I keep telling him, and naming stuff that’s around there, and he seems to know where that “there” is that I’m talking about, but it’s hard to figure. So I’m like giving him street names to go down, but have no idea if he’s hip to any of it, or if he’s just going along and pretending so he can like keep rattling off about his love of music. All the wonderful while the meter’s ticking away, and the fare is growing mighty exorbitant, more rich than my blood’ll take, you know. It’s kind of awful and almost not, too. I like the guy’s excitement level. It’s nice that he’s so passionate about something. The wind of a god blown into him. Real-live enthusiasm on display there, I’ve got to admit. But it was late. I wanted to get home. Then again, feeling connected with others is something I strive for in this little here life I’m leading, and I didn’t want to be rude or asshole-ish in any way’s shape’s form to this guy. It’s a going without a saying, you know? Don’t want to yawn myself away. But I was tired. I was beat. I was horribly, annihilatedly bushed. Exhausted through skin and bone. And I wasn’t being discerning enough in my, “likes.” It was a hard time in New York town, as they say back in the good old world. I’m a casserole of doubt. I’m twice-baked potatoes upstairs. And this Latin-American music aficionado is screeching around corners at the last minute as I scream at him to, “Turn here! Here!” And he’s spitting sunflowers seeds out the window as he goes, and yammering on and emphatically gesturing all the way’s while, charging up hills and coasting down. It’s delirious. It’s wild. It’s a gas. Shit. Jumping Jack Flash, you know? Some of that and less. Well, I’m worried, sort of, but not overly. It’s like how I get in cabs, I guess. Relinquishing control to somebody else, just along for the ride, safe, somehow, and completely trusting. It’s weird. I wasn’t nervous at all. I just wanted him to get a move on it in the right direction, you know? Take me home. But maybe you can never really get back home, again. My instincts were fluttering with casual distress, but sealed inside this fantasy-realm intrepidness I knew no wrong that could become of us. It’s like I was afflicted with a bad case of predestination blues. Nothing mattered, and that was pretty A-okay as far as this here shredded envelope of misgivings was concerned. I pass myself off as courageous and bold most times, though in the thick of it I probably prefer to dart away rather than stick around for the nasty stuff. It works well enough when it works well. But I’m mindful of my own hazardous personality defects in a way that most don’t suspect or even care to know about. And why would they? It’s my own wax’s bees that keep the honey slow and sweet around these here hives. Any which-or-ever way, I’m doing quite a swell job of keeping the conversation working both ways, while also worrying my eyes out the windows for signs of familiarity, for streets we might head down to get to other streets that might sweep us a bit closer on to where it is that I really do want to be getting to. Really, in any situation where I find myself far away from where it is my heart wants to be, well, the later it gets the more I just seem to go along with whatever’s around me in hopes that I’ll be able to reconnoiter my way, at some point, back home. Maybe I don’t listen as well as I should to what’s important, to what’s coming my way from the colliding porous worlds of others. Have to admit that it’s not a task I was made very suitable for the doing of. And it’s part of my self-centered concern for seeming magnanimous that brings on these horripilating pangs of guilt I get for not being able to better care for lives outside of my own life. Seven times out of eleven I’ll be just waiting it all out, for it to be over, and then it’s, “Well, hope you’re enjoying your summer. Take care, buddy,” and all that mamba. Besides, who cares about this here guy me and his pathetic little life he’s trying to lead? Ruins of an underwater ghost town be damned. Lying’s often the best bet in these matters. Once in a lifetime meetings. It’ll all be over soon. That’s a that that’ll stick, right? Maybe. Maybe. Sun that won’t shine. Rain that’ll never pour. We’ve all met our beginning around such things. Cab rides. Phone calls late at night. Ring. Ring. Ring. Nothing. Turned more than around. Less? I know. It’s cradles of mistakes going sleepless before the alarm clock performs its subtle act of murder. We’ve got a handle on it, less or less’s more. Then you come to this juncture in the sway of things, this conceptualizing of rational how-do-you-doing. And it’s learn, craft a way, create your own exegesis and escape. It is what’s hardly lacking in all of us. Something that boils far from any stovetop burner. Openness doesn’t cost a penny, but I still catch myself fleeing from it as much as I can. The cabbie’s all flailing arms and air-instrumentation and gasping breath. I’m on to nothing. I’m dwindling. An open window’s blast of wind is crushing me, and I’m all lunched out, dinnered to dull, and in the meantime snacked all over and in. Mind’s low and away, in the dirt, stray thoughts rolling all the way to the backstop. Nothing seems as ugly as still being who I am, in the back of a cab, plodding along, small-talking and drying out to a bleached awareness, which is sated with the over-ripe boredom of daylight you’ve never had to struggle to see. A particle that’s lost its charge. I’m rainy in the head, wilted and gone too wrong for too long. It’s getting cold in the backseat with the window open, and I want him to close it, but he’s yapping so much now it’s hard for me to interject even the slightest suggestion of a phrase, or really do much more than nod in agreement and go, “Yeah. Totally. Right on,” or some other shield for him to bounce things off. It’s too much ado that I can’t get myself to get on with the doing of. On it goes. As on we all go, too, with it. Like, or just like, always. Vested interest is not taking. I’m up for grabs, my fears and nightmares right along side my hopes and dreams. Put the cream cheese on the bagel already. I’m through, you know? Well, comma comma comma. Shit. Usually I can get by between things, in the spaces nobody thinks about. I can grow slowly, without much notice, through accretion and well-timed attention-paying, to become the steeped rebuff to the slick quips of instant gratification’s spell. It’s not a talent I let on about. It’s dumb. I admit this to anybody who cares about such things. Getting over myself is something I’m constantly challenged to do, and failing seems the only option right about now-- now being in the cab, then, getting socked by wind and this windbag of a cabbie, lost and roaming, licked, spit out into the bathtub of the world, bumming around complacent and secluded from what I should be diving headfirst into. It’s cause's lostness, and I’m dumbed-down and skimmed over the gist of it. The color of gold is changing, imitating fallen leaves and the ragged coats of stray dogs. There’s an ever-increasing surcharge on what we amass, what we spend, what we hunt and gather into our homes. The skirmish of “me” with “you” and “them” with “us” is a battle without ground, and I’m wiped out on the shores of, “Well, you don’t say. How interesting, really.” It’s a bullshit exchange of bad for more bad, and we keep losing more while we think we’re winning it back. Ever the missed point, and I’m lonely as hell. Taking the backseat in the trek of my life, always just a bit behind whoever’s running the show, checking out the back of their head for signs of, well, I don’t know, love? It’s taking a gamble with whatever years you’ve got left, and the odds are never favorable. In fact, they stink to low heaven. Born into this, weaned on it, only to be eventually murdered by it in our sleep, and all the die-short-while we only stray closer to where it hurts us most to be. All of this striving around to be happy. All of this cursed luck and charmed negligence. Not owing even the slightest attention to what’s becoming of the factors that control the world we’re being trained to become accustom to existing in, with, for, or whatever else we can get by with not knowing or caring about. Just here for no reason, you know, and never rocking the boat with our rollicking on the boat. Soft footsteps on the padding that keeps us safely entertained away from boredom, cursed to be in want of distraction, taken care of, just drifting along without even the idea that there might be a different set of eyes to see all of this with, to know it in a way that’s not just, “Oh well, geez, that’s just the way it’s always been, so fuck it,” and in a way that’s not just without hope or concern, filled with apathy and nonchalant greed, but to be somehow craning your neck over the wreck and screaming, “I will not be just another mindless drone on the wide plains of what those around me keep for some absurd reason calling civilization. I will fight against the mechanics of this thing until the gears crack and the whole manipulative contraption blows higher than the sky.” That’s about what it comes up to. You get to choose what you notice, right? The things you notice become the things that make up who you are. A seriously long winding motherfuck of a road of thought and experience between it all, but it’s something to take care of, for, about. Maybe. Or, maybe it’s a combustible and spoiled half-ass solution to rectifying this powerless feeling you get, a warped state of being that’s dependent on outside forces for a way out of malaise and ennui that doesn’t involve any uncomfortable suffering or messy toil. The easy out instead of the hard in. Holy fuck. Shit. Everything, everything, every last goddamned everything is dead. Moses’d shit himself silly over it. Fuck. The cab ride? Fuck the cab ride. I made it home. I gave the guy a decent enough tip for jabbering my ear off while taking me on an unwanted sightseeing trip of wrong turns all over the fucking place. I made it home. I went inside. I didn’t go right to sleep. I stayed up for a while, staring at the walls, wondering what “being home” really meant, what it was or could be, and who it was that I was going to be for the rest of my life, and if it’d even matter. Plunk times plop goes windowing towards struggle’s leash divided by what might equal your future tense. Anyway. I’m an asshole. Don’t listen to me. I know not whereof I speak.

after my guitar is done gently weeping

2011-10-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

Being a public figure takes its toll. I was shopped around on the banks, washed up, in a restoration of wearing whatever you will, in the time to do what does or does not take, busy reapplying nonexistence to younger standards, motivation lining the walls as factions of flower-wearers slimmed down behind the thickness of trees; and there was other higher documentation involved; and yes, conniving shields the eyes, I know, from what experience can’t bring itself to learn; but there, in less than a flash, of course, enlightenment comes with a cost-restrictive clause. The sky is borrowing grays from the cement rooftops and pink from the neon, and some buttery yellow swirls from the lit facades of grand mansions and somewhat less grand hotels. Looking up has left my toes stubbed too many times on these rock-strewn streets. Being a private person leaves one little room to maneuver past life’s wrecking ball; I tell my admirers (the ones who are left) that it gets less lonely all the time. Variations on themeless spectacles, honey-licked leaves fallen through my put-off air’s mush, and it’s like Betty Grable cutting the rug with Hermes Pan before the clinging arms of Coney Island break to cinnamon-strangled pie. I am parrot-lipped. Nobody supports the barking of dogs.

A list of ordinary things: My TV’s quit working, and I’ve quit cigarettes and booze. Music’s gone. The cars still thrash about on the street outside. Toiling away in obscurity has become my day job. Passions have ceased to grip me. Off the record, I am suffering less than you’d be led to believe. I am calling the sorting out of my consciousness a matter of Quality Of Death Issues. Haven’t been eating much before midnight.

I don’t know why my dentist was calling me at 8 in the morning. Her voice was trapped in her throat. We get along during business hours, but this early call was unprecedented in our relationship. I’m considering having my teeth shined elsewhere. Only so much, when it comes to matters of dental hygiene, will I put up with. There are boundaries. We must respect them, or else we become little more than frenzied atoms coalescing into chaotic, less-than-important structures. Then again, I now mostly just wish to be gassed with nitrous oxide. Maybe I should reconsider my instincts to flee.

Fortune is frowning at me, but, as luck would or wouldn’t have it, forgiveness shoves my back away from the wall. People are dying all around me. Mildew has become my one steady friend; I count on it to center my State Of Being. Bravery, if I can harness it, wears me around like a torn-up book jacket, and, without a way to steer, I let wishes drive. “Don’t be feeble,” people say. I put off listening to them until the money runs in.

Very adept, yes, and here comes a gang of softies to ram the door with shoulder-padded kindness. I let them have their agony. I offer them sugarcoated vitamins for dessert. Softies will always go for stuff like that.

So, the afternoons have been playing havoc with my sensibilities. Corruption, inside my skull at least, is rampant. I make some amends here and there, do a few dishes, rearrange my socks in the drawer, and dial the nearest library just to listen to the sound that books make when their pages are flipped through over the phone, almost like a fanning-type thing. The librarian there knows me well, and humors my wishes for such things-- at least for the time being. She must be getting lonelier all the time. She must be like me in a certain way, a seamless curtain of doubt and remorse, a Slipping Away that nobody will ever guess at.

Where the famous go, where the harness keeping me saddled to regret is stronger than my honor, and the Blue Danube flows where all, even the lowly Eskimo-shaped, are scared to march. I pocket my fame; I disrupt a balcony’s serenade; I pot easily persuaded folks like plants; I crave deer meat and sour-apple cider. There’s no church or music hall that’ll hold me. The crowd jeers and it sounds the way my name used to: aluminum crumpled on velvet. The B-side of my life is playing long and mellow and vastly out of tune. The garbage men scream from below: “Go get ‘em, ladies!” That about does it for my good cheer.

Faith keeps plucking at my hope’s viola (though I’m not insulated from bad reviews here), and more than ever I need sticky rice to calm my nerves. Once, being a hero’s hero, I played the chump in the tape-delayed rabid bark of mob justice. Now, oddly enough, dikephobia keeps my socks up. I don’t pander to losers as much, and my checks are watered down with trademark stamps, but I am bronzing the days toward chancy, and I am never surprised by the contents of my evening soup. Once I was not overlooked. That wasn’t so long ago. The minutes starve me from what that was. The hours count me out. The weeks hock themselves to months, and I grow less and less young.

A man who named himself Palace used to wander these halls with a copy of Melville’s Pierre in his back pocket. He’d pound on a few doors. He’d mumble to strangers. He’d sip tap water from an Elmer’s glue bottle. One night, after a violent episode of tiptoeing, the merchants of peace carried him away on a few discarded boards from a scaffolding setup. I miss the sound his shoes made on the thin carpet late at night.

Comfort has gone. My persona, what most would believe to be a true succès de scandale, is held aloft by a bosun’s chair of nostalgia. I would abseil towards acceptance, but am lacking the proper foresight, and so I stay stranded in a home built on the ruins of what seems another’s life-- safe from the unknown, yet dangerously lonely. The morning’s quick beginnings turn to dead halts by evening. Catbirding, I have seen the sea beyond, and, I fear to report, it is too much like all the land that I know too well. Emptiness does not have room for itself.

There are very few places in this country left where I can get a good shave. Most cities leave my face sticky and scattered with stray hairs. Sioux City, Iowa is prime shaving territory, always leaving my skin smooth and stubble-less. I’ve heard Lewis and Clark felt the same way. Something to do with the wind and air quality, or barometer readings. For now? In this city? Fuck it. I’m growing a beard.

A thick, scabby rust corrugates the iron bars on my window. I cannot look out and not see it there, scarring my vision like a gnarled vine gone dead and hard in the sun: one more thing locking me up here, inside.

“Very well, you can have your cashews, your mint tarts, your lazy girth, your canned lust and your cheap substitute for a wimple.” I hear one end of this phone conversation through the walls. “I see through and under all that. I’ll candycane your soul with mean streaks.” The voice checks itself, coughs a bit, then continues. “Yeah. Yeah. You know what I see when I look at you? I see a scared little girl who’s so afraid of being hurt that she goes around hurting everybody else, who’s scared to death of being an actual adult, who pretends to be laughing when she’s sobbing. And, you know what? The act’s getting really tired.” There is some general noise of banging and thrashing about, the thud of what’s quite possibly the phone thrown at some inanimate object. And then, after some more theatrics and the slamming of a door, silence comes back. It is, as always, a welcome thing into the reams of my life.

Scattering, there goes helicopters, and the sound of gunshots, and, scrambling all over for something to steady me, I realize that my holsters have been empty for far too long. The searchlights blind me, but they come and go, as I adjust to window glare and decipher the language of sirens. Decrying the chauvinism of Toucan Troops, with the verisimilitude of circumstances always just beyond the reach of my control, joyriding destiny, devouring hearsaying former sycophants, and chancing, in regards to complex histories of always-almost-over-with events, what little remains of my sanity, I feel my way over the humps and thorny turf of what has, unfortunately, come to be a simulacrum of me.

My sums of money have come down to rolled coins, embroidered cloth napkins, yellow handkerchiefs with delicately tatted edges, paint-splattered pajamas, and a statue of a golden goose who lays no eggs. I use old t-shirts for place mats. I roll toilet paper down the hallway stairs. Death has lost his pen; we know each other somewhat less than we used to, in the past’s music, when we resuscitated one another constantly through pain that pounded down in sheets. I destroyed my bugle last Tuesday, mangling it into an abstract construction, a mute contraption of bent tubes going nowhere that steals music from me no more. The charmed life I once led has been swapped for today’s meat and bread, for tomorrow’s wine, and for doing away with what yesterday has wrought. I will blow my nose no more into this now archaic brand of gold-dusted tissue, and instead I think it’ll just be unwearable boxers cankered with holes that’ll get the brunt of my phlegm and mucus.

Things that come too easy are rarely worth having. My record player’s lost its needle, and the belt’s been cogging and fluttering for years. Fidelity is not in high demand. Most things here have become obscenely intimate, and instead of compassion I find myself strung with the flaking tinsel of a curmudgeon’s dying x-mas tree. Popularity is a temporary thing, and it is a sham. Fling yourself into it; end up flung. I have given up eating toast.

You can read about my life, not at the newspaper stands, but in the sky. Harrowing guilt-- born of failure’s success-- tosses worn Blüchers from high windows. Now? I mutter this: “I don’t want to fit fit fit fit fit.” My speech patterns have lost their punctuation; words are sometimes hard to distinguish from each other. Me? Just building flowers out of milk cartons in the wind. This here guy? He’s whittling younger forms of himself out of the same old wood. He’s just a peruke covering what’s left of what he used to be. Sure, maybe he can stomach it some days. There’s some smoldering posing as hard-won affection still left where his heart once burned into the dying of the light. All is dim now, though, and there isn’t much left to admire.

I used to use my morning to be lazy. Over the course of turning into lazy evenings, somewhere, I lost track of how to not lose my languorous whims while the sun bloated its course through shimmery haze to bland haunts of sky. This face I’ve cultivated far from stardom conceals itself from what it was, from the well-known features that brought swoons and applause at a glance; and now it is only the mirror’s trust that keeps me from thinking, ‘This isn’t me.’ Dirt paints my fingernails. Grime outlines my lifestyle. The surface of who before (it seems so long ago) garnered attention has now been lost and buried in the present’s soot. An overflowing trashcan has come to symbolize my existence; I often catch myself wishing somebody would take it out.

Propellers, cooked raisins, avocado-chunk honey, twice distilled 7-Up, casual relationships with flags from countries I can’t name, sipping vermouth through a straw, olives on fingers, decomposing clutter, flailing charm, greasy toes, long of breath, at a loss for gum, hurried to a standstill, and here comes flinching deviants selling quarters for a dollar each. You’ve got to admit, it takes guts to slap folks around like that. I’ve been relegated to the number nine slot in the line up of my life. When you start kicking your socks off in your sleep, from one lonely place to another, it’s time to reconnoiter your position. There are no birds left to view this disaster that I’ve been growing accustom to being.

The cafes stink of cigarettes and mold. I function religiously gloomy under awnings of discontent. Pounding hammers provide the soundtrack to my mornings, which is better than chainsaws and fire alarms. Rushing no longer concerns me. I make guesses at the noise of passing vehicles. Indisitinctions crawl through the carpet and mumble up with the elevator and spill coffee on the bed. There is no agility to spare in the hard-to-capture clunk of my motions.

I used to know a destitute man who lived a few doors down named Franklin: a guy in his seventies with a patchy white beard mottling the scarred and sun-cooked skin of his face; a guy who’d spent what he had while he had it, and ergo came close to having nothing left; and who attempted to hold himself hostage in a small room 14 floors above the pavement. Just another name and face that I can place all too well from paddling through the gurgle of my past. I get the shakes so bad that I can hardly hold a pen. In dreams I am always running, hurrying to and/or away from something. There is never enough time. I am always unprepared, and a feeling of being exposed haunts me. I meet Franklin in these dreams, perhaps, wandering by the side of the road, trapped in a burned-out building, floating in a ravaged, swampy green swimming pool; and he doesn’t speak to me, but I know there is something futile about my whole traversing of this fluctuating and death-cluttered landscape. Endlessly packing my bags and charging off to nowhere. Hopelessness infuses me as I wake and stare at the yellow walls that speak in drunken platitudes and never forgive. Franklin, too, had walls like this; I believe this may have driven him to clutch violets late at night, dripping with sweat, lost between sleep, pleading with the windows to keep him away from them until morning, praying for the foul weather of his mood to lift. It is always walls, always there to stare back at you with empty awe, and no answers lie behind them. You pay double for your loneliest hours, in the dark, lost, trapped, and mesmerized by the street’s soul-crushing séance: trucks beeping backwards, bus motors idling, the rattle of trashcan lids, the scampering pound of sudden steps on the sidewalk, voices scratching violent chords between the lampposts’ steady hum.

I hear protests still, but they are of the mild variety-- not hurt enough to be more than a bit sore, not weighted enough to know what it’s like be smashed by oppression, to be thumbed to a pulp. And here I am, caught on guard, channeling curtain calls that possibly never were, finding fault with every moment I’ve existed, while they go on rosy faced and boring, tempered and bubbly, not scaring anybody, doing the only thing they know how: useless wiggling to music that means less than something, chanting in the singsong language of empty gestures, frowning coolly in the gusty warmth of a blank-faced grimace. I remember the latter. It wasn’t so long ago, and as I build these houses out of memories to store more memories inside of (it takes cautionary logic to undo me), I sense the ceiling caving in, bubbling downward in blobs of regret as I stick to the present-soaked floor tiles. Sarcasm is the latest form of nihilism, and I put up with my own grumbling too, I admit, but there you have it, right? There. The want of money keeps us all in line. We are merely instruments of capitalism’s blunt force. For the three years I had in the limelight, surceased in a fatal blow of overweening pride, I got what I deserved. Before, I walked early so I wouldn’t run late. It got me everywhere slow, and now that seems bright. Now? Well, now the banks are fighting mean, without my money, and it keeps me wearily edged with a bitter happiness-- one that scurries along on wobbly legs and forgets to say grace until after supper’s gone away forever. There are limits, and there are always more to test, even when you’re up and in; it gets dark; it gets cold. Trumpets hide in my basement as the attic seals itself away, plied with bourbon and roses. Everything, in the end, fits.

silent night

2011-10-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

I don’t want to be Jesus anymore.

Mary’s harping on me in the wings, and I smell golden beets cooking on the horizon. Joseph says, “Hold your tongue, little bitch,” as he nudges me with a freshly sharpened pencil and then scampers off. Everything stinks of mud and straw. The rain’s been miserable lately, leaving a coarse stench of aluminum and kale behind, though it doesn’t come often. I’ve forgotten my middle name again.

“Thorny bastard!” Screams The Little Dictator. He’s mad at me for reasons I’d fathom if it didn’t make me feel so damn uncomfortable.

I walk over the water towards where he’s standing, talking to him well above a whisper: “I don’t go in for all the uncouth blabbering. Hell. I mean, shit. I make enough to ride in a carriage, at least.”

He’s scared. But still mean as hell.

The wind stinks like KFC. I’m not as hungry as I should be. Stomach’s like rotten olives soaked in gasoline.

I catch a glance of The Three Wise Men, who are in camouflage for the day. They can do such things, as they outrank me by more than they should. Muck is their color, and it suits them, I guess. It’s not for me to judge anybody around these parts. I’m lucky just to get to milk a few cows now and again. I’m no-thumbs in matters like those.

“Remember when we were witty?” It’s The Little Dictator. He’s craning his neck up at me. I’m standing real close, pretending, just for a moment there, that I’m a mannequin. It’s a hard task to keep at.

“Us?”

“Who else?”

“Them.”

“Oh.”

The lake’s close. I can smell dandruff and bleachy suds. The Loch Ness Monster Replica is moaning to be oiled.

“Mary’s been sneaking off with Grendel again.”

I try not to look surprised. “I’m not surprised.” The Little Dictator looks dismayed. I want him to be dismal instead. “There’s no use hoping for what isn’t. What is is what matters. It’s pertinent.”

With some tears welling, The Little Dictator looks at his shiny leather boots and mutters, “Examples piss the shit out of me.” That makes me feel better. I clear my throat and flip-flop away.

The days have grown dung colored. The flies are thick. A dusty film covers the guts of the manger. I’ve been thinking about shaving again. It’s just a small thing, and it makes me feel freer. Or, at least, more godly.

Over by the lake I see Joseph, who seems to be talking to himself. Then I realize that he’s on the phone.

“Who are you to say who I am not? Who are you to say? I am not me? I am the only me that there is. That is a motherfucking fact of life, motherfucker!”

It all rings false. Stilted. Too well rehearsed. I nod to him, solemnly, knowingly, lovingly, and walk on.

I am not the only Jesus. In fact, I’m just on a per diem basis right now. Two more guys, who are both noticeably younger and spryer than I, are nabbing what they can of the regular hours. Things are slow around here. It’s making all of us a bit jittery. I’m down to twenty a week, and their talking benefit cuts too. If things keep like this, I might have to sell the piano. The other Jesuses are whispering behind my back, I’ve heard, and they’re not happy with their hours being sucked by a on-call shyster like me, as they put it. At least that’s what I’ve heard. Rumors are always psalming around here. I’m praying they’ll go easy on me.

Last night Mary came looking for me. Neither of us has been dreaming well. I was lying on a bed of nails in the dark, and was a bit startled when she came upon me. I told her a few parables, winked at her some, and kissed her brow, after I mopped it off of course.

“Is this your house?”

“Not exactly.”

“But you live here.”

“Almost exactly.”

“Then why do you pound it so?”

“For a living? Maybe?”

“Ah. Fuck it.”

I get these pills from my MD. They make me spooked, so I try to pawn them off as something worthwhile to the folks around here who go in for such stuff. Recently I mad a small transaction with Merlin. He was cooing to his mechanical doves.

“Yo. Magic man.”

“Sup?”

“I got some treaty treats hangin’ like sweaty balls from my chin for yous.”

“No shit? Fuck. Like the sound of them clankers.”

“Damn. Magic man. You gotta chill. Shit. I’m all in for the day. But yous gots to keep it real down and lowly.”

“In of that world!”

“Word!”

The doves poohed glue. We both ignored them.

I didn’t want to insist too much. I was tired. But I also didn’t want to seem gullible.

“My man, Mr. Magic. I’m so running on fumes right up in here. I gots to make me some tweety-tweet, you know?

“Oh holy fuck of lord, yes! Oh god god god god god, yip-a-hip-a-yee yes!”

I knew I had him snared. We made the exchange of bills for pills, and I was out like the light bulb in Mary’s bedroom, which I was pondering replacing for her now that I had this little bit of greenery. Generosity does not come natural to me. I have to work at it.

Vapid assholes run the show. I get it. I’ve always gotten it. That doesn’t make me feel better about my smallness. This something that is all that I have, all that I’ll ever have or be, is always, no matter what, better than nothing. That’s, at least, what I keep telling myself. This is my body. This is how I go through the world. There’s nothing to be done.

“Jesus!”

It was Mr. Salubrity. He was looking not so tiptop.

“Yes.”

“There’s been plenty of rosemary in my tea lately. Have you noticed?”

“Plenty?”

“Yes. It makes my sipping soapy. My gums are sudsy. I don’t think they care…those…above.”

I didn’t care for his ellipses.

In my best sermonizing alto I told him, “I wish you good spaces. Volunteer your support.” I walked away over a fake cobblestone parkway, looking at my toenails and shaking my head. My tooled-leather flip-flops were making it difficult to stay steady, and the hard-plastic rocks jabbed at my feet as I went, but I didn’t grimace or wince at all. I told myself, “No pain no game, you sick son of a bitch.” That helped.

Mary was in the changing room. She was being petulant. I tried to keep my quiet. I didn’t want to get a wimple thrown at me. She heard the sound of my tooled-leather flip-flops on the rubber of the simulated dirt path.

“I hear you, asshole. I know the sound you make.”

I tried to act startled. “Oh my, Mary. Well, how now does this eve find thee?”

“Eve? Jesus fuck nuts. It finds me in a fucking tizzy. Don’t play coy, dick licker. I’m in a vile motherfuck of a mood, this eve.”

I coughed. I swallowed hard. I made choking sounds. I scratched all around my crotch area.

“Well, well. Mary, Mary, Mary. So good to hear those dulcet tones of yours. Well, I must be on my way. Have a good one!”

I began to shuffle away. She cried after me, “Oh, go fuck a lamb, assmunch!”

As I walked, I searched the sky for answers. The moon was the color of pastrami, and the traces of a few early stars salted the sky’s moldy skin here and there. It reminded me of crushed Oreos.

I want to commission a portrait of Mary and me. There will be cotton fields behind us. Angels will be swinging axes in the sky, chopping apart giant insects and littering the landscape with their bloody bug guts. Drowsiness will have eclipsed us, and our bowed heads will be slack-mouthed and limp. She will be wearing a purple cotton jumpsuit. I will be dressed in a unitard. My socks will be bright yellow in my tooled-leather flip-flops. Suffused with a sleepy forgiveness, everything will fluff and softly fall into place. Mary’s hands will be folded in her lap. Mine will be tucked under my chin, as if I am in contemplation of a somewhat dire situation, or asleep on the job.

Today has been a bitch. It’s a rough world in here. The screams of Sand Blasters, Duster 2000s, Scour&Scrapers, and Industrial Howling Wind Fans ruin my early morning peace. There’s always construction work being done. Everything is being remodeled only to be remodeled again when that’s done. It assures a steady stream of jobs for those who build and destroy things. Also, the cottages are being rewired for Hi-Def capabilities; we are told this will behoove us when it comes to receiving signals from above. I’m not sure I can still believe in the power of the word, but it’s near impossible to remain quiet, and it would be even more difficult to stop listening.

I have become suspicious of meals. At breakfast in the Group Area somebody handed me some orange juice. I took a sniff. The glass smelled faintly of egg whites. Perhaps it was the juice. It did seem a tad too frothy. I was hesitant to sip. Sipping tends to get me into the most trouble. But a gulp? Would that be too much, too soon? I didn’t want to attract attention. Eyes were peeled in my general direction. My picnic table was bereft of other breakfasters besides myself. Whoever had handed me the glass of juice was long gone. I thought about giraffes, wondering if they ever cried. It did no good. Distractions were not helping my cause. The glass of frothy orange liquid was there in front of me. It wasn’t going anywhere. “Drink me or else,” it whispered. Or maybe it didn’t. It was hard to tell.

“I’ve been living to meet you.” It was a jockey-sized person in a white rabbit suit. He had peanuts on his breath.

“Today?”

I have no idea why I said this.

“No. No. I hop so much. I munch. I am subsidized by the corporations that own the holes. My ears are too floppy for their own good. What else is there? I can’t see past my own nibbling.”

Looking at the sky, feigning a holy gesture of a sort, hoping to seem wise and sincere, I sighed.

The rabbit-suited person coughed mildly into a paw, and then piped up: “I don’t want a lump sum for my efforts. A tidy little accruement would be fine, over the course of a few months. That will do me just dandy.”

I belched, mildly. Then I said, “Look. I’m just not with it. As much as you think I am it, that there is no ‘with’ when it comes to me and it, well, that’s malarkey. A pile of pooh. Fancy and complicated. We should know better, but we don’t, still. Would you care for some OJ?”

The rabbit stood up on his hind legs and bowed, deeply. He didn’t take the glass of juice. Instead he bounced his way out of the Group Area. I wasn’t happy with that at all. I stood up abruptly and screamed after him, “That’s right! Just hop away, you dick. Never mind me and my troubles, right?” But I was only screaming at a cloud of dust and cotton. I sat back down, almost as abruptly as I’d stood up, and began to ponder the juice situation again. I thought, ‘What a load of sheep shit. Where’s my holy ghost?’ I drank the juice down in one giant swallow. It tasted like salmon and chicken nuggets.

By that afternoon I was a bit more than a tad queasy. After wandering around for a bit among the metal frames of fake palms, I decided to lie down by Baptism Creek. It was warm out, and the sun felt nice on my face. I lay down on my back, closed my eyes, and clasped my hands over my crotch. Soon I was fevered somewhere between sleep and death. A hazy bleakness overcame me. All was a blender’s puree of mashed and liquefied demons swirled with angels. All at once I was lost, gone, and believed myself to be a meteor fired off into the great beyond. There was no going back. I was out. It was easy, and I wanted nothing more than to keep hurtling off and out, farther and farther into nothing.

A noise startles me out of a bleak trance. Blackness reverse pinholes away as I am rushed with bright. I prop myself up on my elbows, shaking my head to clear my vision. John The Baptist is running towards me, his bald head shiny with sweat. He looks piqued. His terrycloth robe is ripped and worn through in all the wrong places. It makes me incredibly sad and agitated. I want to tell him, “Currently, I don’t feel so hot.” But then I realized all modes of communication with others are quite useless. This realization improves my mood significantly.

“Jesus! Jesus!”

He’s getting closer, closer still. Comfort has gone fishing.

“Save yourself!”

I cannot. I know this. I do not even want to ever want to. It’s not too late. It’s too early. I want to tell him, “We were all getting picked over and pocketed by strangers. At least that’s the way the storms told us we felt, in our bones, in our feet, and in the bowls of pistachios we’d snack on during breaks. The times of being lively were well behind us. Being ahead of the game was our last resort, so we tired fish sticks and macadamia nuts. And so, here, then, there’s a whole lot of screeching going on. Metal shrieking against more metal. Raspy and shrill. High-pitched and yowling. Necessary no longer means what it should. We just do, and we do some more, and we adjust, and we maintain our composure for as long as we can. It is all tooth for an eye stuff. As the neon crosses blister the hills. As rust lasts and lasts. Daunting clauses litter the canvas of my formerly blank thoughts about wear and tear. Inspect what has faded, what luster has been lost. Give your attention to and away from detail. Humans are just another blotch on the surface of things. Decide for yourself what it is that you will notice.”

But I don’t tell him this. I don’t even look at him. I don’t hear him. He does not exist. I lie back down. I close my eyes again. There is nothing there. There is no there. There is nothing. This pleases me immensely.

smoked to life

2011-09-04T13:11:00.000-07:00

We were not using American water. For years we’d used foam, soldered tubes of uranium, and lumpy sun-kissed flecks of spatula glint to harness the potent energy swirl of vocational fun. It worked. We got by. The harder parts of staying unholy: Jesus hair, lost harbinger perception, and looting eyes. Being unholy was only good if you uttered something akin to: “Oh! Holy shit!” That’s about as far as any of us was going to get with it. We talked like wolves hiding in the boscage, almost pounce-ready, but still bashful enough to need cocktails before breakfast. “Don’t hear me listening,” I once warned an armadillo-skin armored Tito. He went light on butter when it came to toast, and this drew respect from those who learned admiration from classists. Me? Well, I enjoyed the challenge of class struggle as much as most did then, but it wasn’t up my alley, per se, to accomplish great things on the scale of well-oiled crispiness. “Be alone and forget yourself,” would’ve been a better motto for us. Over fields of violets we strode in bowling shoes soled with taps, as saltation wasn’t exactly what was needed, but close; and, as one might expect, we used this to our advantage needlessly. Zooming in on the crosshairs of battle. That was a catchall for a few days. It wasn’t a season. We had to make do with pellets of eclectic zeal and soft pink erasers. “Smatter it,” I grew fond of saying. It wasn’t all my duty, but that didn’t bother me. Help would arrive. We’d use it or not. Most of our achievement’s misery was second- or thirdhand stuff, and we, or I too, did not care for later arriving “troops” of a haunting disposition. Varicose-veined men stripped of their camels trickled supplies our way through the airport-security diligence of what we hoped were not enemy combatants. Nobody was fearful. I made careful loops in the metallurgical proofs of what we were then fond of calling, “Our little professors.”

One must maintain confidence in oneself at all costs. Due to the little Korean girls in sombreros and the Finnish day laborers who sell their wares and smoke indecent cigarettes on the curb (because of course we are a many varied species who relish consciousness), we must argue for control of all decisions; doing so makes us appear purposeful and ready to be followed. That is life sometimes. You just have to roll around in it.

What to do. Be distraught with gingerbread. Cook skinless snakes on the stainless steel stoves. More of the different. Be inclined with jumpiness and alert. I am timing bored elephant runners in their brutal task of staring into deep holes of the border’s concrete. We all look for tomorrow in our own way. Hurrying doesn’t become me, or them.

Like the sham looks of retired hornet keepers, when the moon gets this way it is best to leave it alone.

Laughing at stalks. Not sure if they are beans or neglected wiring from gone-bad refrigerators. Maybe we could leave them be, alone or together. We don’t, though. “Capering o’er mountains speeds warm-blooded clouds, bold as ere an eve’s storm; ought not face sunnier climbs, instead place orders through a small window,” retells the magician’s uncle, and then, “I cannot listen to everything I hear.” It’s a good accompaniment to my sound-incapacitated pinball game. The stalks return our favor with windy shudders. Believing in something takes a know-how that none of us as of yet possess. A sign? Well, I am not one to consider truth to be less likely than belief. Besides, replaceable parts have fallen out of favor with the more progressive among us. Open a can; scream, “Can opener!”

Far flung. That’s harder not to explain. It turns out the captain’s got gout. He told us yesterday over cockroach lasagna, just after dimming the lights. The troops were not exactly rallied by this. So many of us are rashy and dyspeptic. We’d all be willing to trade beer for new skin, but there’s nothing here to chase us, and so we stay, not hidden as much as unseen, patrolling sounds or less flattering bodies of water with a bit of hunger comforting us to a steady beat: “Lum, lum, lum, lum…” Piece me together and you will have nothing except used parts.

Jugs. Ewers. Earthenware containers. Canteens. Plastic bottles. Barrels made of ravaged shingles. Thin-stave kegs. Zebra-skin flasks. Human hands. We try not to let things slip through our catching vessels. Copper vases in fireplaces. Clean? That’s difficult to assess. It might be worth somebody’s while to account for leakage, in terms of ullage or with a grains-per-sand scale, but we don’t come to blows over it. We are all considerate of moderation-- though none of us knows how to perform moderately. It’s not something that worries me. The scenery here tells it like it never should’ve been. The scent of pine sends us half crazy into October-country withdrawal. The lowing of the foghorn makes us reminisce. It’s like a treaty we’ve not only never signed but never even seen-- only heard of, without listening. My new pajamas are just snug enough without being too tight around the hips.

Not completely assured that the sky would let itself rain, we ran out of hats and cigar boxes at the same time, and so had to gather plastic bags. Further convictions were left at the exit. I ran. It was just out of spite though, so I halted myself before too much had become of it; and, if truth tells on itself, I spent a night sleeping through bouts of thunder with trembling windows momentarily lit by flashing yellow-bright streaks of what I couldn’t conceive of as lightning.

The stairs helixed. You had to lean your way around down them. Every step was loud, even bootless, even barefoot. Too much rambunctiousness did us in: stomps and readily available panned shows of unclapping resistance, and what most of us were referring to as “moon heavy” disarmament plans. Friday held on to Thursday with the jealous grip of next Tuesday’s grim infatuation. We launched paper at the air.

In the midmornings we speak of photographs we wished we’d taken. Hands don’t always clasp. Our voices are little more than whispering. A few go on and off about unused utilities, drawing chopsticks as they stop and go, uneasy, tempered, and, what really clips the cow’s tail, brave. Vermouth flows; we mix our spirits with gutter water.

“Don’t ever tell me to ask. I’m mischievous enough as it is.” That’s what a clambering sneezy bastard said the other night when I conspiratorially winked in his general direction. The rivers were bland. We all had Texas for dessert. Nobody fed themselves. A geezer who weighed more than a docked oil tanker told me, “Crowing gets one everywhere, it seems.” Through the blinds we get Novembered to dry thoughts. “Gas pumps,” I almost cough aloud, “are bespectacled in these parts. Keep your eyes off of them. They are being milked.” Shyness almost overwhelms me, so I stop, crawl back towards the ATMs, and attempt to mentally bull’s-eye the constraints of my escape. It doesn’t work. Frederick, a temperamental bassoonist, keeps me in check with a moonlit mile of chewing, gaping, and lewd grapples with honey-soaked prairie dogs. If we argue, which is not quite as often as often, it is beyond the capacities of mootness. Recently I told him, “Let’s change modes of chance for a change. Believe in gasoline; it keeps us poor. Nobody, not even the rain, pays such small dividends.” If he heard me he wasn’t listening. It goes with much saying, for he is and ex-rebel, and I cannot pull the plug on temporary Midasism, even if it martyrs itself for the best. We boil monkey skin to add some zest to the robust zeal of our nights. Washing clothes is not an option. Dirt lays down our schemes for us. We must not omit it.

I was working on staying dry. Rain stomped down; we apricoted from the pit of the stomach what good umbrellaing would do, and it worked, dingy was at was, and, without further fear of safety, we gassed it. Mostly it was courage we paid for. Kinship? Lost allure? Siphoning? It was all done with the hassle of grogginess, ever old, upon us. Killing trees for spare parts? Nothing was below or above us. I decided to wear a permanent pout on my mug. It wasn’t a shame at all.

We slip on melted gold. I hack my madness from tree stumps, and then go off telling stories to make everybody’s sleep easier. The aluminum ramparts grow sticky with mold. This isn’t a mess for those of us troubled by crouching small. The way to swim is sideways. Entrancing as bathing in warm milk might be, it is not our wrong to flourish in a hard or easy manner. The captain fetches us for reasons nobody should ever know, and we crank the gears backwards, and we dog nap, and the valuable extractions like black blood sprinkler all around, and we rinse off under the spray of petroleum until shining is all we can do.

Most of the coal workers had married widows. It was a safekeeping measure, not always followed through on. Most of us knew when not to keep quiet; we were loud about it; the birds even eavesdropped in while the coal shovels clanked and scraped, while we squatted and harbored no ill-meant “all’s well” in our devising. Fatter times were ahead, we were told, and we wasted away to bone wishing to know them soon. Soon? Well, that didn’t come our way until the spill, and the spill conjured its own spirits among the largest yacht-goers from hither to to. A way of going crazy, in particular separating one’s self from the selves of others and flipping and rearranging how the world views itself, is the only way we seem to be able to go, now, or later, too. The sky is cloudy with remnants of crude dreams, visions of the Orinoco oil sands scandalizing the brutality of our lazy clichés, and, in the meanwhile, we fast for the duration of the harvest. M. King Hubbert blushes below his roses. Clinging hands is what we’ll say we’ve done. A soft touch is too much to drain our sap because we live our lives below the surface of whatever gushes down to us-- as in: grow a tail just to snip it off with the scissors of an idiot’s profit.

Most of us locked away our trinkets and small-time valuables when we got here: a bastion built, we hoped, against needless worry. Certainly, there is worry among us still over the patchy matters of drilling guilt, and pardons, which doesn’t make any of us feel exceptional, but does stoke the emptier parts of our souls with fiber. It’s a matchmaker’s disease, and we’ve caught it, and it gets us from meaningfulness through sadness to riskier investments. We dwell among lively soubriquets echoed in a steel cavern; I have forgotten my own name, and for the most part merely hunch my shoulders at or to whatever comes my way. The drums fill and leave us be. The clack and drone of the conveyor belts carries us off to sleep.

Harking gets us less information than we supposed. Uniforms of lost officers hang among the spare horse heads, walking beams, pitman arms, counter weights, cranks, stuffing boxes, tees, and a pair of self-made magnet shoes I’ve been using to jump from roof to roof. It keeps me agile. We look nowhere for tenets we’re pretty sure we’d never get around to following. Silence resounds. We’d listen to the slick, liquid quiet of springtide if we could hear it. “If you’d rather give me a yard,” I’d like to tell the administration, “then I’ll have to go on spending my inches as they come.” There’s no response to this that would be adequate, so I separate myself from the blasé mood of it and squelch the voice of the goodness it might have done. You’d think there would be more frustration, more antagonizing of the upper echelon by those who trump decision making with harder labor, but we are missing the links to galvanize ourselves, to reach out, to be parts of a grander whole, and, also, we have charred lives to take out on ourselves.

Inspecting the subterranean depths, slinking down spiral staircases with pith helmets and flashtubes until we hit the chilly (and even, oddly, somewhat dour) dankness of the rock, we become acquainted to the shale’s personality, the coarse bitter love of its nature, its terrestrial longing and fossilized moroseness; and, in loops of here to back here with no there, we sense early on the ceiling becoming the floor, and we exeunt while we temporarily have the knack for it. As we remove ourselves from the equation, the possibility of smoking rubble chimneys puffs away the kerogen of our lost faith, and, so, we rigorously shelve misguided tours of self-deprivation to make room for the medium-sized aspirations (and, by jingo, extrapolations) of God-fearless yokels. We are the lacking, the men of ore’s soot-black smoky goodbye, those of the shoveled frowns and scuffed souls, who drape their dreams in ash, drink dry the tar-thick liquid of their days, and make way for the well-beyond steam-driven powers that be to pat them on the head and tell them, “Hey, it’s been nice knowing you and all, but, um, it seems it’s time you best better be going now. Ahem.” We don’t add up or substitute mixers for the hard stuff or, also, mix well with others, for that matter. Maybe, in the dimness of our suppressed resignation, carouseled on a tired aria of gloomy harmonica music, I sigh to myself, “Bow out or be borrowed,” but, still awake when the rest of the world is asleep, I’m not listening.

Ophelia Parsons’ Last Letter Home (posthumous)

2011-08-20T17:39:00.000-07:00

Dear mother, I witnessed blue daffodils this morning outside the gray gates, and I wished to wash myself in them, as I would have wanted to, back then, when I knew you for sure. Dear. I stay mostly strapped to beds. Hospital beds, that is. These days have lost the tint of green. They smother me backwards, not like eyes at all. But I am wallowing beneath pillows so I will not wail. It might be that it seems poor of me to reach out for anything, now. Only you? Well, get me to stay asleep, and that’ll keep waking cats from flying. For me, here, the wallpaper is pleasant enough. Not like you used to say: “Worldly and wordy,” but still good. It escapes me, staying hidden, and I must work hard at relaxing, or, in the space of small, slow breaths, realize my capacity for calm. “Onward!” you say. That is a lively batch of luck you are amassing, I must admit. It does me less than good here. Children tend to the flower gardens as marigolds steal my name. A whale in a blue moon for you to drive by into the night, without me. Did you know that my driver’s license has lost its expiration date? Sentimental, mother, I keep it in my underwear drawer. Jostle. Hunch. That does it. Here. I’d give a diamond for your thoughts. I’ve been hamburgered to starch and bones, and have my moments of dullness, too. For a week I was invited to strangers’ kitchens for cat soup. I refused to behave cordially, and I sat alone in my room by the light of muted TV, and drank whiskey from tiny vases and sewed my thoughts together with curtained memories, mother, of the life I used to have, the one I lead for you. The veal of me is cut with grooming habits I cannot quite maintain. The road’s closed. I am browned with sugar substitutes. But do not worry, mother, I have my if-I-fall-in-love-it-will-be-forever moments, still. The lights? They have dimmed, yes, some. And sure, soup bowls fill my shelves without soup. Is there still an anyway to be had? Perhaps. And so I croon to coins about dollar-bill adventures. My sipping is not as noticeable as my dissipation. In the light of all this piano playing, I am sure as surely not praying around novices and cap-gun wielding foes. My escapism is bowdlerized yet dashing. It is all for the kids, here-- all of this. And walking on the beach late at night I light cigarettes by a fire pit’s still-hot scraps. Noticing me is not for the kind or the gentle or the manly. I am adjourning my life until my money spends me. Mother, take care. Why not? I will foot (or hand, or mouth) the bill. So, well, mother, zip on over in your ’62 Plymouth Valiant and take my temperature. Rusty smoke stacks puff my bad days away. From a window I can see the wine corks clogging the sewer drains; the smell is a slight compensation for my lack of guts. Mother, dream for me. The causes of cerebration are not as lonely as we once thought. What are the heights we once disappeared to? Where’s my pony? Mother, curses. It is cross. It is a taxi who won’t stop honking. It is the situation’s silver. The insects here are tattling on me. Wish off what I can’t escape. Barely unfit, I will hamper our looking. Mother, distress me if you will, but I cannot fund my own demise. The church doors of my mind’s safety have been blown. The colors of flamingos seek my beginnings. And so I plead with the owners for my right to an ordinary life; a light goes out. Vim kicks at my vigor’s pants. Be heavy with my flowerpot; dancing petals concern me more and more each afternoon; the creeping slowness of their motion is related to walking with more than just a limp. Mother, you notice such things. Mother, I might be losing this battle against my own willpower. Get the odds for me, if you can. The balcony will not hold me for much longer. Streets to steer clear of, yes-- that is what you will say, mother. Coddled for too long and not enough. Just hold the vinegar, and fill my toilet bowl with ballet. The bed bugs will rise to the occasion. And I will be shuttled off to where I won’t ever belong. Mother, there are no mistakes left to make. The ladies are no longer frightened of my goiter. I am being frank because I feel more like stormy weather, because I left you my Los Angeles Rams earrings, because I dote on Harpo Marx too much, because I am used to being used. Mother, this will be just one of none, many of a few, and the last of my firsts. Mother, the ocean’s braver than I. Get well soon. Best wishing. Part my hair with sorrow. I am all fished out. That is, lucky.

the lost potential of tapped resources

2011-08-17T21:39:00.000-07:00

Laurel: I am the Gary Busey of poetry.

Hardy: No. More like the Mo Howard.

Laurel: Rang like silver?

Hardy: No. It shone, though.

Laurel: Now there’s a way I know where I could put in a swimming pool.

Hardy: The call of the domesticated?

Laurel: Shake it.

Hardy: Done. Oh. Yeah. Done.

Laurel: Fed Cassius Clay his first beer, for 25 cents.

Hardy: And in less time than it took Andy Granatelli to fix a flat.

Laurel: He knocked me out.

Hardy: Yep. Cold.

Laurel: Nice to toast in the winter’s first chill. Nice to be craving fantastic limits. Nice to choo before a haw.

Hardy: Yep. For nubbers like us. We smoke ourselves down to nothing.

Laurel: Leave it to the grail diggers and the gravest of holies.

Hardy: Smell ‘em going and leaving.

Laurel: I’ll never forget the stink of certain lurid things. I won’t go into it. I won’t. It doesn’t do.

Hardy: Forgetting? Hell, creeks do minor damage to major players in this, you know, in this, you know, in this, you know, game we play.

Laurel: I know?

Hardy: A game.

Laurel: We play?

Hardy: We play! We play. We play, we play, we play, we play, we play.

Laurel: Seriously?

Hardy: Never!

Laurel: Give me the words. Put down a fight. Get it. Get it. Get it. Down.

Hardy: How am I going to go? Down, down, down, down, down.

Laurel: Match my sticks, you gunner of love. Belated, as you would. You would! Belated, you come. Finally! You would.

Hardy: Worried?

Laurel: Me? Nah. Too much bossa nova going on beforehand.

Hardy: That?

Laurel: Yes. That. And also being blinded by a tuxedo moon.

Hardy: People used to do cool things around here. People don’t do cool things anymore. Why don’t people do cool things anymore?

Laurel: Technological savvy.

Hardy: Ah. Shit.

Laurel: Playing around is frowned upon if it’s too original, or too old fashion, or might make somebody somewhere feel that special joy that comes from being alive.

Hardy: Loudness. That’s all that counts. Separation. Cutting one’s self off from all those other selves out there making their little noise. Zoning out in this personal space we carve out, this tiny nook of uncreative drool space. I am punctuating. You. I. Fuck. I cannot be. Know. Together.

Laurel: Hyphenated tempers. Spare colons lacking in, commas, that do without inside brackets. Between exclamation points. Never to be trapped in the belly of a paragraph.

Hardy: Trying. It’s not. It is an end result without going through all the trouble of getting there. Nothing to do with natural rhythms.

Laurel: Finding new ones?

Hardy: It’s poorly structured. But who are we?

Laurel: Just a couple of poor nubbers. That’s all. Smoking our brains down past the filter.

Hardy: Young is up for what’s never coming. What it doesn’t want to or can’t imagine. Youth values its own futureless participle of being young. On and on. The eternal, “What now?”

Laurel: Breath used for using breath.

Hardy: Vampires are chasing our shadows and they’re missing teeth and we strut by and they say, “Hey! Who is that who goes there?” And we play smart and act dumb. It’s another show we’re missing out on. The vampires are no longer thirsty. Our blood is worthless.

Laurel: It’s not the time now. It’s never the time now. It’s not what you ought to think about.

Hardy: Stretched over bamboo. Bahing badly, but at least not booing.

Laurel: Humming over the sound bugs make.

Hardy: Like that?

Laurel: Sorting it out. Sort of.

Hardy: Houses built. A swell joint swelling with overconsumption. Grade me.

Laurel: Straight seas.

Hardy: Half pointy. Right arm’s for rubbering. There’s a hunting I’m sure we’ll never get around to. But haunting? That’s reading a pulse by Braille.

Laurel: You shout, shout, shout, and shout while I’ve been keeping quiet.

Hardy: You’re the James Cagney of keeping your trap shut.

Laurel: No. The Forrest Gump of being cool.

Hardy: Born out of this, the way we are, or were, if we could be, then, what we’d like to be, some one day.

Laurel: Bruised and brought back, less weary and more aware.

Hardy: If.

Laurel: If.

Hardy: Shortly sold.

Laurel: No. Borrowed to steal.

Hardy: The slender ladies of the dance.

Laurel: More mothballs for sale. More lonely nights to not have to spend. Traditions tossed to the desensitized scrum.

Hardy: Voracious. These are the kids who steal from themselves to turn somebody else a profit.

Laurel: I’m the Archie Bunker of love.

Hardy: No. More like the Flipper of off.

Laurel: Not what I am, but what I mean, or meant, to be.

Hardy: Lap it up. I’m getting back what I never had.

Laurel: Bundle me up and take the wings from my ways. What we found in the barn. What they trounced. Give this away from what’s become of us.

Hardy: Lots of going. On. What’s to bust or take? What’s meant.

Laurel: Noises in a noisy hotel. We lobby for more. But who? But, I say, asking, who?

Hardy: You put the ass in ask.

Laurel: Placebo, please.

Hardy: Have you ever caught yourself wide-awake?

Laurel: With it. Man. I am. That’s real. With it.

Hardy: I listen at night only.

Laurel: Last night I had the strangest dream about Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Hardy: Did you believe it?

Laurel: Believed it. Legs and thighs and breasts and all.

Hardy: And the train runs through it.

Laurel: Around it too.

Hardy: Ends are given to the lined up. Begin. Again. Begin.

Laurel: Party hats on.

Hardy: An aura of expectations is created. I’m tired of funny people. Could I get a little seriousness up in here?

Laurel: Course it follows. No ransacking allowed. And Caruso was bigger than Jesus.

Hardy: I’m the Caruso of lap dances.

Laurel: Not something to brag about, I’d think.

Hardy: Depends what you mean.

Laurel: Lapping it up? You mean?

Hardy: Surnaming pets. Getting to be cranky. Up by default. Try me. Go ahead. Try. Try. Try.

Laurel: You mean?

Hardy: Pianos that rollick more than they bounce.

Laurel: You mean?

Hardy: Mean. Mean. I’m tired of looking like me.

Laurel: That’s something like this, “There’s a wife to look after, or to look after you, and we don’t turn our backs on family. We’re good.” Something like that. Or, “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone away.” Something, anyway.

Hardy: Gaps in all I’ve got. Photographs of trembling out of work. Eyes white to the bluest black. Focus. Remain neutral.

Laurel: Patrolling. Hell. Rock me like a chair. That’s out of my jurisdiction. After you, the genuine article goes putt, putt, putt, putt.

Hardy: A Bud Light truck backing up down a hill. A very distinct way of telling unimportant things. It’s useful to be useless.

Laurel: I read the future in last night’s graffiti. It usually conveys a sense of malaise and dread mixed with a whiff of saffron.

Hardy: Our world? Laxatives chased with Imodium.

Laurel: Or, “Sitting in this old jailhouse, I know it ain’t nothing but a waste of my bodily dimensions.”

Hardy: Space without. Space within.

Laurel: Or, “Brother, how much I’ll do to you anyhow.”

Hardy: Grow your own vegetables. Raise other folks’ kids. Snoop. Get a line to dry your personal effects with. It’s not, nothing is, demanding enough. Of us? For us? Well, we ameliorate our video game collection and get over it.

Laurel: Chain us to the miles we’ve never had to walk.

Hardy: Nope. It inhibits growth. Sullies the prefect ironic wink. Fast only loses to faster, and nothing gains. It’s only what is lost. Everything. And how sad how little it is, what is lost. So little. Nothing really. Can’t take it with you. Just move on. See a movie.

Laurel: Comfort wears time up its sleeve. Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored.

Hardy: Boring.

Laurel: What am I concerned with?

Hardy: Boredom?

Laurel: Yes. Exactly.

Hardy: And so they win, right?

Laurel: Every time.

Hardy: Who?

Laurel: Exactly.

saponification

2011-08-15T17:06:00.000-07:00

scuffed blues

the written sky claims

to be marred topless

we spot

longshots & popcorn tails

selling good’s buys

before tulips close

so intuition’s counterfeits

can destroy pluck

hardly telling

curtains grime showers

old as stone

our devils descend

moded out of clutches

slightly blown on

off our veering trails

as they say

miss mights

wrong new’s rights

and snip cruddy hours

from the day’s flowers

but who finds its own how

gardening over breakfast

we take tea’s time and

fit propellers to our pith

don’t ask what’s a drop

to a spilled ocean

if regret’s water

and fish fly backwards

or a breath’s air swims in silt

as it smiles for decoration

then surely hands are not dishes

but

also

like sure’s glad almost tells

we argue

they just might

be spoons

cymbal man with flat feet

2011-08-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

Sword-billed Hummingbirds for sale. Pricey. I’d rather buy a vending machine filled with parasols and plastic rings. Curtis. Jamal. Could I get an usher in here to fill out my blank spaces? That’s all. Boon. Vance. Let’s get a double move-on on it. Federal law requires these things, you know? Give that remote control a whack on its back. Go ahead, like you’re burping the damn thing. That’s it. Easy now. Don’t want to thrash the vile contraption so it won’t work like it used to. Come on, Krissy, get the kinks out. Let’s take the garbage out now while we can. Rather have a smudge here than a smudge later, you know? Forward. Progress. Intelligent go-ahead runs at authority. Yes. We do what we can, and maybe what we thought we couldn’t. Level the heads. Vast. I mean, really? I’m gunning for an out, likely enough where there’s no hope of a gun or a hard-to-swallow theory. Stop. I’m going to ruin this. Evelyn. Greta. Sammy. Run or get ready. The bear robot’s making martinis. Untie the soldier’s shoes. Wash. My habits are becoming nasty. Be groomed. Be kind. Be hale and graced with filling. Stuffing. Other wah-wah yelps. Daggers I might hurl at walls. Vroom. Bill. Oran. Vanessa. Chad. Remember, what we’ve got here is a victory over communication. An opuscule for sale. All of my works for some doll’s shiny button eye. The rigors of motion stopping in for business. Kurt. Wilma. Paddington. Over here. I’m looking at you. Now, let’s stick around. Let’s. Hush up, Kermit. I’m not playing with any of you anymore. Klaus. Spare me a nickel? Brenda. Mama. Vigo? Pat my back. I’m making it up. Never mind what I’m saying. It’s what you’re hearing. Clear space. X out the needy. Everything you want becomes what you need. Morgan. Sherry. Dress your kids in lavender. I’m making myself up. Henry? Get me a rough cut. It’s a steal. Barnaby. Larissa. Mess up my hair. I’m in the butcher’s union for life. Always scrambling marinara into the clouds. Roll. Stay unfit. I’m plussed just so you can be minus. Clear the ends of my zone. It’s Billy. He’s in the game for life. You have no idea what I could accomplish in pants like this. Loop or dissect. Let’s make a decision. Holly! Get on it. I want a fresh-out-of-the-dryer towel, pronto. Stop being a waste of space. Hubert! Get the lead in. Arf. Arf. Goobers are plopping all around. It’s me. Alaska’s out of Ranch dressing. Either that or they’ve hidden it all in the basement. Cash out. All in. Let’s get a bird’s-eye view. Let’s bench press paperbacks. Don’t go for it. Alice. I’m mistaken. Only it’s now that we deal in artificial artifacts of newness. Over all the Suzies of whatever Lionel ignored. Dreams time talk by the strongest divisible decibel. Let’s make paper out of airplanes. My mercy machine’s on empty. Gloria! And damn you, Herman! Or maybe that’s just you, Wyatt. Could revenge be a dish best never served? I’m my own evil twin. Last month griping was becoming my favorite hobby. Now? Now nothing’s new. Angels have grown small. Victor. My, my, my, my. I’m stolid in my regards to what you disassociate from. Attacked by two-headed tulips. I eat all of my buttered bread upside down. Cast me as a roll player. Topple dimness. Return my soul to sender. Address never to be known. Jeremy. Susan. Wesley. I am leaving. I am nothing but a backache waiting to happen. I’m shunning sunshine. Courtney. Don’t yank your hair out over it. Penelope. Clyde. Let’s cut this shit in. A bustling dimension. A dancing asterisk. Devon? I’m closed most mornings. Farewell to our grenade days. A cooper’s been cross-country skiing past here lately. Figures. My barrels are all chested. The undiscoverable world of hairnet fishing is finally off my mind. Frederica. Bob. Hester. Bid a bit to go clear into that heap of crushed soda cans. We are sensible. Varnish the rats with mean streaks. Veronica. Babushka. Tell the time! Vince. Ned. Pamela. Sleep sincerely in fields of crumbled muffins. Curtis. That’s the way to stop on a penny. There are no shoes to tell my story like these shoes tell it. Mary. Alan. Icarus. Vanish this landscape into thick water. It’s lately that men sewer for likely stories. Depends on what you’ll never mean to be. Gregory. All credentials accepted. The torturous and painfully cruel history of us disrupts the normal activity of our lives. Back by nightfall. Miloš. Victor. I have the rugged, worn, scratchy face of an old criminal. Don’t be pristine. Nothing’s a harder tic to banish. Astrid. At last. We seem to have reached a disagreement. Carousel the deviants. I’m all for spotting land. Bridgette. Mairead. Boris. And you, Timmy. Burn the piano to keep us warm. Don’t be too serious with your food. Plan to never attack. The bells are all blue around these harbors. Lois. Source me. Look it up and down. I’m finding it out this side or in the other. Late is to run back. Michael. Gina. Xavier. To whom it does not concern. Look dull. Bob. Groom before you preen. It’s not that I don’t like water. I just hate when it falls. Allan. It’s going around. It’s the latest way to say goodbye. It’s lipstick on a straw. Polly. They’re before you. Question the door. Don’t barf after tea. Get after those slippers. Marie. Don’t be early. I’m operating on disconnected phones. Don’t miss the sights. And let’s challenge the holding capacity of cylinders of ethanol. Be rushed. Solfeggio me until the farmhands rid the barn of the tiniest bales of hay in the world. Stu. Doc. Chick. Rest in war. I’m bashed by laziness. Zip away. No. On fourth thought we’ll save it for recess. I am energy divided by the sum of motivation. Enrico. Jerry. Gain hair. Create unimportant benefits for freshly dead beneficiaries. Hawaii is drifting. I have seen the sea’s dominion over creeps let go jailers to swim free. I have known obstacles such as brass hooligans and torch-bearing bandicoots flaring the dark like radioactive jewels. I have matched the sun with stares. Winifred. Turn off the solar panels. I’m shimmering to death. Caspering along as we were it was only a matter of immaterial resources shrinking to a diminished popped bulb in a smoky TV. Orson. You are less than well. Fight your cards wrong. Quiz the stumped. Pigtail cranky ruffians until their skin screams for honeysuckle and white toast. Benjie. Heloise. Read letters by moonlight. I am squatting short. I am stuffed empty. Furbish my heavy-metal renditions of Brahms’ sonatas until they dully shine more than waxed-paper leaves. Heracles. Mandy. Let’s make ice out of creamlessness. Nobody’s old anymore. La lured dee to the dah until doe rayed me. Nachos for the plebeians. Amen to the alignment of curfew with yawns. Vladimir. Don’t label me eristic. I’m mostly more artisan than bricklayer. Next stop’s busy-as-potential. Francis. Step off it. Dang if I’ll be blasted. Want to serve me crashes while I deliver cars to all the girls next door? Sheena. Get me some potential. Don’t lose it in a dazey blunder over cold spaghetti. Okay? No more sprawling blight. It’s gotten so that garbage dumps have got their own zip codes now. Pink drowning the depths of gray. Pinstripe the opposition. Put ‘em in rags of rage. I’m often lumped in with radio listeners and pinochle champions. Earl. Etta. Byron. Over my live mind. Fans of very little put up a fight. Tell them all that I’m in the stars but I’m gazing towards the gutter.

that's the way the market crashes

2011-08-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

I'm an American, once removed. Don’t rely on me to tell you when it’s time to task-complete. I mean when it comes to collapsing, when it comes down…what I mean is, when it comes to being unimpressed, but not showing that you’re unimpressed-- when it comes down to that, well you don’t got to go around and change the light bulbs about it. Gas it. Cover the once of it with over. Done. That’s all I’m saying. It’s grok between you and them, and your urge to create and your urge to destroy get tangled up, and your pins are quaking, yo. That’s a fair assessment. Don’t be so damn scared. Shit. Get the with-of-it the hell out of your system. Get the laugh, then jet. What’s to know about it? Edification. That’s not a secret any of them will fall for. I’ve been living with cats for too long; they crinkle my broadsides, or’ve come to. Do this; don’t do that; fit in; die. That’s what they spit on about. Tromboning on through the cummerbund of seasonal maladies. I’m looking. I’m almost aware-- unreliable too. Just in case you didn’t notice the first time through. Getting through with waiting around, with loitering in the shadows, with Krazy-Glue sunsets and glow-in-the-dark on/off switches. And crawl (bent like knees) through, through, through the badly timed jokes, nifty piebalds and mares, geldings and jennies gone to pasture, and keep crawling (evenly on all fours, no matter how odd), as it’ll be older here by now’s then. Big kids take the bus; you know that, at least; don’t got to feel it too. And sure, Avogadro’s number ain’t as constant as it used to be, but I spindle my brains over the feasibility of that damn Hadron Collider making any shit-stain of a difference in why my kids are all bothering to ape TV characters over Fruity Pebbles in the morning. Vapid, it all takes shape, and we shoot out the color from traffic signals, and our eyes adjust, and the scramble for justice rings itself up as free. I’m only spreading a truth that rings rumorish. Don’t believe in me. Go about your glib saucy way. I’ll be hiding in the medicine chest, behind the Vicks Vapor Rub and the mineral oil. All the newcomers are growing old, wildly. I’ve got the grace I’ve got, hidden there, beneath the broken flowerpot; it doesn’t show. Hydrangeas are my oldest pals. My pride? Riata it in, banged up as ever. Man oh man, am I going stuffed and underused. I sing like Dean Martin and get all the laughs of Jerry Lewis, too. So, give up. Pay the bills. Offer a few tads, there and here mainly, of flavor to the world’s boiling smorgasbord. You need the courage that comes with the companionship of others to combat the loneliness that’s life’s dripping faucet. Reliance. It’s a gamble. What seems an easy exchange from hand to glove gets kicked around more than a rodeo clown. The strangeness of trying too hard to forget what went wrong and kiltered, kinked and warped, off to avert truth-be-untold differings of trauma: so this is how it’s going to be, huh? Mainly, man’s done for. Stack a couple of Big Macs on my grave and toss the wrapper in the grass. Shit. I mean, where’s the where of here? I’m not there. Fuck it, man. I’m here. For fuck’s sake. I’m here. Hear me? Not there. Here! Here! Ah, shit. Well, what’s a single meaning of it all anyways? Beat yourself up about it and go straight to hell. Crowds of cowards gathering. I sense an unmonumental shift in how things will never get finished. I’m talking packaging: Styrofoam containers, cigarette packs, lost wallets, basil, mischievous underpinnings unique only as imperious items in a display case warning of illicit housewarming gestures that everyone wasn’t scared enough not to make. Importance fallows on away. We are thumb-based creatures of uneven psychotic apparatus who stumble post-id into filling-station ideas without caring or knowing why or how, or mostly who too, really, and then lying down comes around to coddle the insecurities that come along with a poor-credit rating for your soul. Don’t believe me. I’m out of sorts. Grumpy and jilted and appraising a slump’s last confetti toss, scrounging through lost pieces of evidence before a jury weighs in. A bad bet to make against the nature of capitalism, something that outlasts us, up-down haywire shiftings in a loose network of economic transactions that’ll become your life’s Richter scale if you’re not careful, or too careful for that matter, about it. Don’t take my rice-futures word for it though. I’m not going to go ahead and blame myself for hedging and leveraging derivatives like a ninny. Many’s the deep-in-the-dollar-signs, in-the-buff calls I never made. Got me? Bluffing was never my forte, though I did gamble without a clearing-house’s chance to insure against-- what they say? You know: inclement weather. But that’s just stringing diamonds behind a trash truck. Sometimes the smell of it gets to you. Sometimes you’re free enough, if you can afford the market price of freedom. From? Of? Do we even know how to be free? Sometimes I wonder. In more than a while's once, we all need to do stupid, reckless things. Unfortunately there's a certain joy in being held captive: never having to make a decision; the convenience of being caged. Maybe you pay somebody to be free for you. That’s a one-way ticket to the kind of thralldom where the one locked up doesn’t even know she’s enslaved. Like the prisoner who’s asked by the guard, “So, how do you like being kept here in this prison?” and in turn asks the guard, “What’s a prison?” The large notional value of your life keeps growing as the reality of your worth remains hidden smugly beneath an arbitrage-free personality, a lady who smirks and winks brazenly through the variegation summing up the barrage of what’s persistently being lost and gained without much notice from those attempting to ogle into the machinery of the not-so-free market. Risk it none. Accept what’s commonplace as a lost cause. There’s a clatter in the basement of the stock exchange. We’re scrambling to make ends never meet. Bilateral netting gone to the cats. Lipless OTCs and ETDs playing dangerous with expensive lipstick. Swap me a few ounces of equity for a few pounds of moral fiber. I’m making planes from faulty parts and selling to an over-paying Uncle Sam, and all for the sake of a greasy buck. Maybe you lose a few fighter pilots here and there, but there’ll always be innocent casualties to get blown to flower fertilizer by the wayside. Can’t worry yourself to death over the lives of others. And then you glance around. You give the thrice-over to lapses in somebody’s idea of good judgment while hedge funds are quick to rally with much pluck and myopic, foreshortened foresight to take advantage of the tiniest moment of hysteria and slight panic. A bell tolls? Maybe. But who’s listening? We rush through the throngs, the clamber of shifting variables that’ll puncture those delicate speculative bubbles, those soapsuds of no intrinsic value, checking our pockets constantly for signs of a past we’re unable to keep up with or feel we’ve ever known properly, while paperless worries cast ominous shadows that we grow so accustom to that we no longer realize that we’re in the dark. And the cost of war rises as the price of life drops. I spill a few tankers of oil on the sand, and somebody screams, “Blood!” It’s all a wash. Get yourself a dollar’s worth and heave away. This ship’s sinking and sailing at the same time, and there’ll surely be more shores than we know what to do with soon. Soon. That’s the marvelous stink of my own marginal profit. Richly poor. Always just on the cusp of it all, but never there. Or here, for that matter. Yep. Ask for me in the morning, and I’ll be gone-- even if this is the morning already, and we’ve always only known fixed interest rates that stay up dancing all through the night. Because, you know, we’ve all been doing the dead cat bounce for the eternity it takes for the present to occur. And this, in the beginning, middle, or end, is what’s keeping the most of what’s really us just passing for what we currently call being alive. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Shit. No. But hell, nobody’s looking. And, as far as this here proverbial bed-wetter is concerned, there isn’t even a tunnel. Say goodbye to all of your tomorrows. I’m checking in late and staying until the bulls make a break for it. A hopeless case? Sure, but listen: there’s a hell of a party going on next door; let’s go.

east of east st louis

2011-07-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

Hello. My name is Clarence Plum, and I’m going to take a hard right across America. Hope the burned blush of it doesn’t get to me, but I’m riveted, and it’s needless to say that I’m pretty dog tired of the murder of days rolling along here, getting nowhere and nothing. I used to say, “Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to be litterbugs.” I’m not sure it mattered. Everybody scatters their trash. It’s a private nuisance of mine. Got to go around slopping it all back up. But them’s the breaks of it. I mostly say that now. Drink fire instead of wine. That gets me through most of it. West is only water. East is sunset. I get more out of the cold weather than most. Maybe I’ll head north. Anything to get a where that’s not here. Nobody enjoys the present enough, and it don’t last. I grab a handful of yours and…well, it’s bourbon and soda in times like these. I see things blotchy sometimes. It’s okay. My head stays a mess for the worst of it. Give me a pair of Babe Ruth’s bowling shoes and I’ll flee to other shores. A feeling’s humming through me that I’m missing out on things, always missing the best of things, the good stuff. Run a comb through the sludge of my hair. I’ve got my unguarded moments. Got to go through hell sometimes to catch a glimpse of heaven. Prayers all corroborating my alibis. Old judge Masters, that stinker, chucked the Book Of Sam at me. Then Evelyn left me for a bible thumper. Let him have her. Who needs her? But I tell you, I’m still looking for her in some other girl’s eyes. Every other girl. Even or odd, just roll right along through the muck like always. One sapropelic motherfucker, I am. Always deserting on the detritus of situations that I keep getting tangled and thrashed about into.

I start to think of my drunk aunt whom we always had to move. Her waterbed that finally popped and gushed out to soak the carpet as we waded away. I start to…“i was nine and was walking on the beach and my aunt who was a floozy and a drunk was lighting a cigarette cupping her hands over it in the wind and i thought she might be a scarecrow but then didn’t know if scarecrows could be women and why anyway would my aunt be a scarecrow though crows would certainly be scared of her she had a face like a frying pan with day-old bacon grease in it but i was nine and impossible things hadn’t started to seem as unlikely yet as they one day would because being nine you know enough about stuff but not enough to really know about stuff and that was me then feeling as old as i’d ever felt feeling my age nine and it was something wonderful with my bare feet on the warm sand and the wind splattered at me and the sky so big it was like it would never end and i wanted to go dive into the ocean and tumble around in the waves and be lost and i was nine and it felt like something important to be that age then walking on the beach and my aunt lit her smoke and laughed her raspy laugh and coughed her hacking cough and winced and squinted and mussed my hair and i ran and i ran on ahead and she called to me but i didn’t hear her i had more pertinent matters to attend to and i was off kicking up sand behind me as the beach seemed like it would never end and i knew the ocean would go on and on and i’d never get to the end of it no matter what and i knew that it didn’t matter anyway because i was nine and my life was my own and there was a whole world going on around me that wouldn’t care if i disappeared and i wanted to be gone and the ocean was calling me by name and i ran and ran and ran and when i hit the hard wet sand by the water i hardly knew where i was and it didn’t matter because the water was cold enough and i was nine and i’ll never forget how it felt”

Alkaline hell and high winds are the vade mecum of my traipsing. Listen well or know where we are. The sewers and oceans. The jungles and slums. Clean air and a diesel dreaming smoke. Families race in squares about the rattle of vacuum cleaners. Roam as the road’s cleared. Just thinking of you. It’s not jumbo. It’s not as magnificent as Ambersons. Talking less than keeping quiet. Sludge of wet grounds left at a coffee cup’s bottom. Used. Burlap and Kevlar and ruminating from the clack of bones and the gnash of broken teeth. Spooning time into paper cups. Let’s let the road clear itself. Order. Order. Ordering the important of what’s what of the who. Like that. Getting back to the you in you. And then. And then? Yes. Sure.

And then you get to thinking about how that rent check’s burning a hole in your pocket, and a blazer of whisky’d be a good companion for the night. Maybe a pack of Luckies and a record player. A few dances that won’t ever wear themselves out. Cents you make instead of dollars in exchange for what’s left of your brain. There’s a pale wish skipping over the moon, and tonight’s just an empty pocket to shove a cold hand into. Strut around in a shabby suit long enough and the world gets to forgetting you long before you’ve forgotten all about it. Gray tidings and square-shouldered applause and a fortune of subway tokens. Making up excuses for falling back out of love again. Radio’s shot. The dark’s got the only light around. Tonic water mixed with whatever’ll fire it down to the gut. Hung with a dead man’s tie. The beams break with the sound you scream. Nothing’s got enough weight to hold whatever’s keeping you down, and saxophones’ve been broken over less. And you don’t even own a piano. Maybe you say to yourself, “Don’t mock me out there or forget me out there with the blown leaves and the runway fur coats. Let me stick around for a while.” There you go holing up instead of holding up better. The sky’s your only better half. A ruined hack skirting his ambitions until another spring comes around to kill them permanently, again. Half of you’s dead, and the other half’s not making up for it. It’s cocktail weather. A friend forgets you and you turn up half your collar. Fireworks pay attention to whatever’s left. Take the elevator to the roof. The noise you make’s just a minor catastrophe. The cabs will all pass you by. The bars’ll all close on your nose. The gallows don’t need a ladder to get you to them.

Bland. Calling it like I ain’t used to seeing it. Fats breaks. There goes the eight ball. You know how it goes. Those things. It’s not that I don’t got class. I’ve just dismissed it. Early. A boon to the famished instincts hunting all over for a way to not have to go again. Phone calls gone MIA. I got a girl who ties my shoes for me. I’m not disturbed by any of it. Let her pass spelling on to the golf prose. Who needs her? Full of grouching and bemoaning and hustling me out of my own apartment. A cat’s crawled into the alley. Time to let it go. Extremely perishable at all times. Pinned. Counted out. I’m putting the punch back in Hawaiian. All the crowd wants is more noise. The lights are always so insecure, going around begging for a smoke. Broke the shade. Misunderstood the robbers. Went holy-over-holly to get back to the crooked and wide. Bundle my head up with cigar smoke. I’m all shook up.

As the afternoon goes calling for beer I go scouting familiar things: playing cards, gum and glue, tinsel, a dusty necktie, badly dented cymbals, laceless Vans, bad manners, a cold half-cup of coffee, cigarette ash on an old movie poster for Dance Hall Racket, gray boxing gloves, bank receipts curling in a pile, toast crumbs and toothpaste stains. There’s no bottom to this. I put in a little time swaying towards Bethlehem. It’s redemption’s plight. Sorry, so-so, or a big fat pink slip from directly up above. That’s how much we’ll get done caring about the condition of the economy’s jugular. In general, by the time I get back to the bottle it’ll be time the bottle’s had just a bit more than enough of me. I can cope. It’s legitimate. Performing CPR on the city’s punctured ego. Clattered. Buddying up. Valor buys itself another lady for the night, and I’m stuck lurking in the lesser-known side streets of ways I used to know so well. Get a lunch special of whatever it is that’s driving distraction around. Really not the strangest route if you start to think about stopping to think about it. Tariffs paid by skid row’s finest. Bused to the delivery section of Go Thou Across The Land. Raincoating your dreams. Cut in of or out for whatever it is that arrives later than night. Buying less of what’s in store for the damaged. Fleeing four-wheeled terror. Vast and ill-tempered. Burnt out on being good. But my dreams ain’t good enough. Not no more. Wrecked in the blessed I go forth and do as I must.

Taking no for a question. There’re places to get to. Lots of down-and-out to climb over. I make speeches in strange voices I’ve never known to crowds of paramilitarians and earless boxes of musty clothes. Never to be squeezed safely home again. Pour me a drink of moonlight, forget the ice. Pass me that hat that’s going around. Surely as two right feet left. The road screams Clarence. I forget the sound my name makes. Sarah Bernhardt’s calling, calling. Dear, dear. I’m on the roof with somebody else’s wife. Oh lord. Tell her. Leave my nightmares in her name. But tell her, please, tell her I’m done.

wristbandpincushion

2011-07-21T21:22:00.000-07:00

a some that’s not a where

i’ve gone ever

after

or a you

that’s a kiss’s soft

turned moonsilver

before spilt drinks die

for the ice of another

we’ve

at least

got dancing’s long

with a sleepless here

to bring lost blooms to

openended petals

as feet march spring’s song

and toes twist fall’s gone

we’re still

slightly silently

back when hands hold

and shades draw

so no worry ever slowly

grows like nails

to win

this side of

will be

or were’s are

until then spells now

and i is assured

an us

to travel with

more than gladly

over any under

and never

glued beyond our’s this

or born at most

as lost as also’s too

xerxes in arrears

2011-07-19T22:59:00.000-07:00

Dear Esther,

I have no interest in big stupid oafs who sleep well at night. You who know me so well should know this well. It’s an echo of snores, of blubbering burps, the stink of cheese, rotten chard from the flatus of fools. Don’t you worry though; corrosion is a principle I’m well aware of. You can’t keep blinding me with science and expect me to just gung-ho go along with whatever it is you’re using to stave off being tired. The wiles of musclemen and the ruses of muscleheads lead one nowhere except to the brink of undone chores. The pomes of cotoneasters tell us more about quick fixes in the grout of things, things being the instrumentation of your life’s music. Contentment comes at a price. Sleep comes sometimes, but not rest. Never rest. You’ve got to beat the tiredness somehow. Strangle it to the floor, suffocate it, grind it down to dust and powder. Grain alcohol and soda water. Maple syrup and barley wine. A concoction of pulverized dandelions, the juice of a dozen Sour Patch Kids, a thimbleful of meatloaf grease, 4 ounces of Diet Rite, a squirt of lemon juice, 2 teaspoons of liquid pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, a splash of crushed quartz, and a few sprigs of watercress floated on top. As always, I ideate in the slow hours of sleepless dawns these recipes. What the Q-tip-inclined among us might come to think of as the tip of a pinky finger quickly plugging then just as quickly unplugging the ear.

Essentially I’m hog tired, which is a fatter and even lazier sort of tired than dog tired. A term that suits its owner well. Nothing blaring but those essentials, essentially. Put forth your bravest hand and the foot will dodge out of the way. Other than that it’s keeping time to mental balancing acts, or screaming, “Over and out!” over and over. Me? I’m more interested in the quality of observed holidays. The spiritual nature of them, what will surely out-and-out come to pass while we all dance around playing hopscotch, or drinking scotch, or wrapping scotch tape around our heads, or scotching plans to be more prudent in our foresight.

It’s silly to be realistic when it comes to people. Trust me. I know people; I know what they like. People like ribs. Hickory-smoked baby-back racks of ribs with honey mesquite sauce slathered on them. Spare ribs. St. Louis Style. Country-style. Button ribs, rib roasts, rib chops, riblets. You give them ribs and they’ll be happy. Baked, smoked, grilled. It don’t matter. They will say, “Give me ribs or give me death.” Well, that and maybe a bowling ball. I know people. Yep. Have them eating out of the palm of my hand if I wanted. Don’t want it though. Not now. Hands are too delicate for such things. I’ve got motions so fluent they’ll put the socks back on you. Trouble is, I don’t wake up to it fast enough, and spearheading another wince-able castoff into the parsed plien-air of it is making goop and flavorless dog food for jeerers and flouters.

The city sweeps at you, coins phrases with windy gestures as plastic soda-cup lids and leaves twirl in the same jumble, and you step over street-sleepers and slap your hands on lampposts and jump at yellow lights. It’s manageable. Access dismembers partners of double takes. I order takeout whenever possible. My sensibilities are constantly being baffled. And you take your blue periods, more or less, and spread them out over a fire-splotched lake of maybe a few years more. And you take them as they go, each one a deeper and less refined blue than the one before. But your best shades were never much anyway. Hopes get dashed, or dotted, and then some guy with a bad haircut and sandals on comes by and tells you to knock it off just when you thought you were really getting started on something. Cashed out before you even knew you were in. Think of it: normal people in their normal clothes. Jeans, flowy button-ups tucked in, too-big t-shirts, white socks, combed hair, flab and filler, locked up and empty. Sometimes I shout, “The clouds are pink! Look up! Look up!” but nobody listens or looks.

A mustache is painted on a marble lion. A rooftop antenna sprouts like a miracle above, and I stare at it, so arrow-like with its almost ornate metal fletchings, and I think about human beings in a very odd way. Busy things waddling about in these bodies: hairy, flabby, awkward, lumbering, skin-covered creatures who breathe and eat and lounge and defecate. Personalities are diminishing. It’s like wandering around on another planet, or more like in a wild animal park where the animals are not so wild nor are they really that animal, really. Humans seem unnatural, as if they’ve forgotten how to live in the world they’ve been brought into, if they’d ever known, and now are just finding more ways to avoid that world, to build their own out of cement and radio waves and fabricated reality. It’s a triple standard, maybe quadruple even. I sidearm pennies into traffic.

The best thing to do sometimes is just wonder about the quality of tree leaves that get in the wind’s way. The redolence of dead grass (as the wind in this season blows from the land to the sea) keeps you guessing. There’s always the past. And it’s always gaining on us.

But get this: the clock above my head said, “I miss you,” as I waited at the terminal’s entrance for the deboarders to go by, then you reminded me that every first last is timed effort strained without deliberateness. I told you that seas don’t become rivers. That was a time when we could still laugh. Before we made history inside our History Factory. Before I was so casual with my I-love-yous. Before you had somebody in line who was waiting to take my place. Thieves of discontent rattle the bars of my sanity’s silence. I am quiet, quiet. You had candy-bar lips and root-beer hair, and the place where our eyes met was corduroy on a tarantula’s silk footprints. The bathroom was always a little too far away. A Quonset hut of emotional repair work kept us warm on cooler nights, that and a temporary disregard for temporal satisfaction.

I dream of terraces and plum blossoms, crocodile clips holding love letters intact. And then some white sedan drives by with “Don’t Believe Everything You Think” stenciled in black on the side door. Gushing, the plain-clothed haberdasher says, “Those palm trees on the roof of the building, look at them, think about looking at them, what it means to look at them, for them to be seen.” And I listen to it, mostly. I only know space and time autonomously. Already, there isn’t too much to see, and it is only getting darker. The spiders are barking. The buses are all going the other way. Even the lunatics agree; it’s time to spatter the gist of who we are onto to-morrow's windows. I’m baking a canna pie that won’t be eaten before it cools. It’s a shame, really, as there were always a few spots of gold in the oil in the old days. The neighbors are teaching me French.

Au revoir.

The Circumstantial Plight Of Binary Stars

2011-07-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

Sneezy: How many trips to the Laundromat?

Dopey: Don’t know. It’s nothing I want to count, to even think it over at all, at all.

Sneezy: But it’s gaining on you, maybe?

Dopey: Look. I don’t care about it. Leave it alone.

Sneezy: I’m rubbing my feet against something soft. It helps me relax.

Dopey: That’s more like it.

Sneezy: I know. More of that, right?

Dopey: That’s the stuff.

Sneezy: Soft stuff.

Dopey: It’s worth more, and we plan for retirement while thinking these things.

Sneezy: Sure. But wait. What about at the bar that night?

Dopey: That night? Well, you see…

Sneezy: I do.

Dopey: I was trying to talk about The Deer Hunter in a way that’d bring a reconciliation to what happened to me in my own life and it was horrible to try to impart this in a bar also to somebody else there who wasn’t a sharp listener at all really and who didn’t owe me a thing.

Sneezy: But you talked about moving, well….I guess it’s always away, right? When you move it’s always moving away from something, even if it’s moving towards something else. The way you move is right in line with…

Dopey: The way we all move, right?

Sneezy: I’m no good at fact checking. It depletes my frontal lobe of its cleverer treats. Yes. I guess. The way we all move is away.

Dopey: Moving back?

Sneezy: Away also. Away from something, right?

Dopey: Or the bringing of inside things to the outside, or putting outside things back where they once belonged: on the inside.

Sneezy: Jumbling.

Dopey: Whatever difference in the sig or quantity of the thing, it merely amounts to a Hobble Skirt of misunderstanding, the way I look at it.

Sneezy: The way you look at it.

Dopey: Softly.

Sneezy: The way I feel it.

Dopey: A Linus-blanket of the senses. I talk to people, but I rarely listen to anything that I’m saying.

Sneezy: I’m going on strike.

Dopey: I’m retiring.

Sneezy: You? You hardly work as it is.

Dopey: I know. It’ll be an easy transition for me.

Sneezy: But just think. It’s a loophole of taste and tradition. Something lost because something’s always got to be gained. I want to fall awake and stay that way until they invent a new way to manufacture dreams.

Dopey: Don’t get carried away. I’m less of a winner than you might think. Maybe I’m more of a dyer than a liver, too.

Sneezy: Liver? Would that be chopped or diced?

Dopey: Bah blah bah blah bah. There. That works. That’s what I meant.

Sneezy: Perfection is achieved. The smell of a day off on a workday is always different than a weekend scent.

Dopey: A pairing of bland couscous and ground salmon bones.

Sneezy: That reminds me, my refrigerator’s been talking to me.

Dopey: What’s it got to say?

Sneezy: Not much. Mostly just the weather report. It’s not too accurate either.

Dopey: My knee’s pretty good at that. Knows when cold’s coming.

Sneezy: Joints ache. Arthritic. Where the bones are scared to tread no one goes.

Dopey: It’s a jocose result from awkward ministrations. I condemn myself so you won’t.

Sneezy: That’s the kind’a talk that’ll get us all killed, or badly maimed at least.

Dopey: And when your foot, or your shoe I should say, hits the pavement, is it really the pavement down there? Is it really there at all? Is that you putting your foot down there? What’s pavement? Did I mention concrete, tarmac, asphalt, brick, stone? Or Portland cement: flyash, blastfurnace, pozzolan, silica fume? Slag-lime, supersulfated, calcium aluminate? And what about tile? Ceramic, porcelain, glazed limestone, mosaics in rubber and glass, granite, marble. Need I go on?

Sneezy: Please stop.

Dopey: Just trying to help. We’ve got to learn, or stop learning, at some point, that who we are can be, might be, maybe, even if it’s not an of course or a should, could be, possibly, not dictated by what we do. Because really, those feet down there pounding the pavement might not really be there at all. There might not even be a world.

Sneezy: And we under-sleep our way out through it, attempting the “into” part of it but lacking the requisite guts.

Dopey: But am I the only me I’ll ever know?

Sneezy: You the only you? That’s more than enough.

Dopey: This is me biting what’s not a fat lip.

Sneezy: Not yet.

Dopey: Shorely, shorely, it is not so. I think it wise to brave the woe with tortures few and worries no.

Sneezy: What the fuck?

Dopey: Oh, just some slop and creamed mush I picked up in juvie. Nothing to juice carrots about.

Sneezy: Somebody’s doing too many loads of laundry at once these days.

Dopey: I opine more than I pine. Shrug. There. Go ahead. It’s mordant at best, and we’ve smiled without laughing too often already, and I’m cheapest with my time in the present. He who animadverts on the past is lucky to get a chance to weld himself to the future.

Sneezy: I’m gassy.

Dopey: You consume an inordinate amount of polysaccharides. I pity your poor wife, stunk out from under the tight wrap of matrimonial sheets.

Sneezy: She should be so lucky to be downwind from the likes of me.

Dopey: Or the hates of you. Also, getting all worked up about the oddest of things, do you find yourself?

Sneezy: More lost than ever. Laundry comes and laundry goes. Clothes won’t clean themselves. I rely on the spin cycle, the rinse, the tumble dry.

Dopey: Pray for sunshine; get splashed with rain.

Sneezy: And then we get soaked with trying without putting forth any real effort. A patchwork of cindery attempts to futilely stop where no woman has stopped before. It’s uncommon nonsense. Strike blame through it, here and there, and before you know it things’ll just cross themselves out on accident, deliberately.

Dopey: It’s not such a wrong thing to lose when winning’s what’s making a mess of your sense of your own enjoying of whatever’s there to lose for you.

Sneezy: Blah? Or would that be blah blah blah?

Dopey: The only thing left that makes any sense…

Sneezy: Let’s not blow it.

Dopey: Right. Because we dig our own trenches, specially and specifically made for anyone else but us.

Sneezy: Making up our minds to be serious, to be lucky, to pattern our lives after the lives of clouds.

Dopey: That’s good enough for me.

Sneezy: Drones taking lives as the city’s buried in my i.o.u.’s. It’s patterns of this and patterns of more of this. The enemy is never ours. We only know of them through statistics buried in the newspaper’s back pages. Civilians are not real; they’re numbers to be counted and ignored: the price of leading these lazy and self-indulgent lives free of remorse, guilt, or any real empathy for anything outside the safe bubble of our personal sphere.

Dopey: A lot a’ medium-cool air, my fellow.

Sneezy: The All-Thumbs Generation hunches their collective shoulders, yawns, and gives up.

Dopey: An alligator chasing its own tail.

Sneezy: I ride the subway alone, look out the windows at the bacon-colored rust marbling the rails, at the fog-licked hills, the houses lined up in neat rows, the misery of immobile pumpjacks and derricks, endless lines of traffic-snarled cars, big rigs belching exhaust, people singing inside closed windows. There are no movies playing in America. And I’m lonely. No matter what. That’s what I’m left stuck with.

Dopey: Cartesian dualism will get you nowhere. Not in pants like those.

Sneezy: Fast, for a change of pace, pull away, zipperless, double-knit reversible trouser darlings, skin-tight, pegged, button-fly, gone trout fishing.

Dopey: Boy, the cases of The Borings have increased exponentially over the course of all these supper-less bedtimes.

Sneezy: Raise your right hand…

Dopey: No. The left. I swear.

Sneezy: We are awful tacticians when it comes to solemnity.

Dopey: It’s more to the center, the humor we stumble on, or craft out of art cartels. It’s piecework, yes?

Sneezy: Boy o’ woman. I’m low-nosing out of here if the air pressure stays steady.

Dopey: But the Laundromat’s still open for beeswax.

Sneezy: Too hot for coffee.

Dopey: The trips add up, but they don’t. Not really. It’s all the same journey, going nowhere, getting nothing, achieving small gains on emptiness. Rolling that same boulder up the hill, over and over. Clean to dirty. Dirty back to clean. Upkeep. It goes on and on, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

Sneezy: The downside of upkeep. I don’t know. It’s slim. Tiny SOS’s slipping through the cracks, messages we send out hoping somebody somewhere might accidentally read them, might notice, might return something of ourselves back to us.

Dopey: Yes. These throwaway lives that we lead. Nothing stays. Nothing matters.

Sneezy: Wash. Dry. Fold. Wear out. The accumulation of always scattering dust, it’s what makes us who we are. Or, well, more like who we are not.

Dopey: But what about fabric softener?

Sneezy: Don’t use it. It’s pointless. My clothes are soft enough as it is. Maybe I need the grit, some sort of an edge to things, a hardness, a little hunger in my gut to remind me that I’m alive.

Dopey: In the striving for high ideals we get permanent-pressed into ordinary constraints instead of insisting on being dry-cleaned to a crisp, tidy finish.

Sneezy: I’m the sudsy water leaking from the machine’s bottom, pooling on the floor’s tile, soaking shoes, making the world happen to whoever happens to be around.

Dopey: Irons steaming out the wrinkles in the way we were.

Sneezy: It’s a copout. Folding techniques tell their owner’s story all too well. I’m brisk. I flourish a wild hand at times. The sky reminds me of the sound of my own name.

Dopey: Bed sheets and comforters. Towels. Low-heat-only linens. Bath mats. Rain-soaked shoes rattling around in a dryer. Liquid or powder detergent. Choices, things to ponder over. Magazines and newspapers and romance novels. Crossword puzzles. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting in plastic low-backed, bucket-seat chairs. Waiting while the world turns.

Sneezy: Scraps of sunlight painting accordion shadows on the opposite wall from where you sit and wield a pen like a dagger.

Dopey: Back and forth we go, laundry in tow, never ourselves to ever know.

Sneezy: Unliked?

Dopey: Perhaps. As if that were a curse and not a blessing.

Sneezy: Perhaps both, if there really is a difference. Existence proceeding essence.

Dopey: Fuck it. I’m getting a cat.

the stilted situations of traveling salesmen

2011-07-01T19:54:00.000-07:00

tip me over with

she didn’t say

newspaper clipping of a Picasso

cat eating bird

raggedly triangle-pupiled

messed up over a chase

it wasn’t dig

ripped now flimsy

hip pocketed

it oughta be drugged

out

for the blocks it takes away

dimpled traces of hands

with fingertips sprouting flowers

at very last

goofy

vested with uninteresting earlobes

rattles back to fine

cries don’t suit

to gill-breathe forgives

lawn insects their splats

clogging the drains

never make it

to the ocean

your hat

please

jerk

the infinite vs. the unknowable

2011-06-28T22:41:00.000-07:00

The rain wasn’t helping things. The dugout steps were slippery enough where you could’ve slid on your spikes and blew out an ankle, or at least turned it some. Maybe your glove gets so it’s a bit waterlogged too, and so that could’ve been what the catcher’s saying out there, you know, when the ball slipped through and skittered away to the backstop. There’s, too, a record that not everybody’s going to know about, being that it don’t happen much, and that’s where the pitcher gets four k’s in one inning. Think old Cannonball Crane was the first, a way back in 1880 or something. It’s a strange rule that allows it. The catcher’s got to actually catch the ball after a strikeout for it to be official. If he drops it or let’s the thing squib away behind him, well, then the batter can run on down to first and try to get there before the catcher finds that ball and fires it over to first before the batter gets there. There’s another thing though that makes this a bit less likely. There’s got to be less than two outs and first base can’t be already occupied. This, I guess, is because the catcher could drop the thing on purpose right there in front of him and then fire it to second, and maybe have a double play on his hands. Kind of like the infield fly rule. Catcher’s mostly hate 2-strike splitters for this reason, or any kind of junk pitch that might bounce or rattle around, or if they get crossed up. It might be a shit rule, but it makes for some excitement.

Anyways, the 4-strikeout inning is a record held by all kinds of people, but 5? That hasn’t happened in the Bigs, well, except for knuckling Joe Niekro who did it in Spring Training, so it doesn’t count. So, well, on the rainy days when the ump won’t call the thing off, well, you get to thinking, chewing sunflower seeds and staying dry in the home-half on the bench, maybe, with a strikeout guy on the bump, just maybe today’s the day for a fiver.

On this particular rainy day we were playing the Cubs, who most folks don’t recall were labeled the Chicago Orphans for the 1898 season because Cap Anson left ‘em high and dry after becoming the first in baseball history to amass 3,000 hits. We had a day game there at Wrigley, which, by the way, is all they used to have there, day games that is, up until the mid eighties when they finally went ahead and modernized and installed lights so they could play at night, and it was drizzly that day but not enough to get the game delayed. Guys were wiping their bats off on their unies between pitches. The outfield was a bit mushy, and you’d get some grass and mud caught up in your spikes out there. It wasn’t anything to go bellyaching about. You played through it and didn’t whine because the other guys were playing on the same field, you know? You think it’s maybe the roughest on the two guys in the squat though, because being a catcher’s already doing the grunt work, and you’ve got to slosh around behind the plate and try to catch a wet ball. The conditions were pretty damn okay for dropped third strikes, that’s for sure. You get to thinking though, how about it if the catcher keeps dropping those third strikes? And what if the guy keeps making it to first afterwards? How many strikeouts could a guy get in an inning? There’s really no limit to it, if you think about it. But there is, too, a limit, because the inning’s got to end at some point. It’s just impossible to really know when. It’s not like it could go on forever. The final out would have to be made at some point, even if it’s way on down the line. There must be a third out. Just like the game must end at some point. It can’t go on forever. There’s just no way to know for sure when that point is going to come. You could estimate about it, sure, but there’s really no way to know for certain when it’s going to happen.

So, anyways, I’m spitting out sunflower seeds on the bench, and I’m noodling about such things, you know, how things have to end. Nothing lasts forever. Just simple stuff that everybody knows. But it just occurred to me, well, what if an inning never ended? But isn’t it the nature of an inning to end? It has to. A game’s got nine of them to get through. It can’t just go on an on. So, also, there’s really no limit to the number of k’s a guy could have in an inning. My head didn’t like that though. There’s got to be an end point. Swimming around in eternity can get a bit iffy, you know? So, it’s like the Fresno Raisin Eaters of 1906: it doesn’t last. And then you go on wondering whatever happened to that record you used to own called Double Play! that had the wonderful risqué picture of the quite possibly topless blonde in the Hollywood Stars hat on the cover. My mind’s off wondering, to the races, and I’m likely mumbling to myself too. Dragging the infield of my thoughts, you know, and it’ll take a dinger to knock me out of my gooey trance, I kept stumbling over this apparent antinomy of endless k’s. To my mind it’s that whole if-there’s-a-barber-who-shaves-only-and-all-who-don’t-shave-themselves-then-who-shaves-the-barber thing, and I can’t dance my bean around to the paradox of its music.

Sure enough, though, by the time I’m pondering the bench pressing of these rather heavy things, the ump calls a guy out on a close play at the plate, and we’re headed back out to the rainy field for the bottom of the current inning. I grab my glove and start padding back out into the wet. It’s getting worse, the rain, and some of us are starting to think the game’s going to get called. But it’s only the third, and they like to get the game official most times if they can by giving it the old four-and-a-half, so we’re prepared to slosh through it. I’m out at short. There’s a lot of debris and mud holes out there. The seagulls are swarming a bit, maybe thrown off by the low attendance because of the inclement weather, and the day game’s atmosphere in general that just feels odd, especially when you’re out there on the not-so-well-groomed sienna, chucking away pebbles and fielding bad-hop grounders and basically just feeling lazy and worn and cold. The wind was doing little tornadoes here and there, picking up trash and dust in foul territory and in the outfield too, and it was fun to watch between batters or during huddles on the mound or when guy’s’d take their time between pitches.

My head goes from overflowing to empty pretty damn quick, and it was like that out there on the field, and I’d stopped thinking about the Eternal Inning for the time I was out there scratching doodles into the dirt with my cleats. Anyway, the Friendly Confines, in all of its brick and ivy glory, is getting soppy, and a lot of people have cleared out already, leaving a good amount of empty seats, as both teams we’re already mathematically eliminated, as they say, from post season at this point. The hush and steady murmur of the crowd’s a strange thing when the stadium’s kind of emptied out like that. It’s like you can hear individual shouts and distinct noises coming from the stands better. Sometimes I swear I catch little snatches of conversation going on out there. It’s strange. I don’t really know how to explain it right. It’s like the less people who are out there, well, sometimes it just seems louder for some reason. Like this one time at Fenway a few years back, when it was in the 14^th inning and almost 2 in the morning, and cold and windy and awful out, and there were only a handful of diehard Sox fans left in the stands, I swear I could hear every word of a group of guys in the upper deck singing Neil Diamond’s Cherry Cherry. It’s those types of things that make me scratch my bean and yawn because there’s no good that’s going to come from noodling all the whys of it. Life’s just a messy blur of crazed stitches sewn haphazardly into Time’s jersey. It’s better just to yawn about it all sometimes.

Anyways, I’m out at short, getting kind of drenched out there too by this point, and it’s starting to get swampy around the bag at second, so I’m playing pretty far back, almost to the grass, to the third-base side of things in general. Sure, I was giving away a lot up the middle, but the guy on the hill for us was a real Jim Kaat, and so I wasn’t too worried, and besides, I’ve always moved well to my left and was never afraid to get some dirt on my uni. Our guy toeing the slab had pretty good stuff that day. He was pounding the zone pretty good and was working quick, so there really wasn’t a whole lot of downtime to contemplate the mysteries of the universe, at least not too profoundly. He had a good sinker, and it was really on that day, so you had to be on your toes for grounders, which I was, and couldn’t let myself get too distracted by hypothetical conundrums or a group of fans shouting all in unison: “What’s the matter with Keller? He’s a bum!” Carney Keller was on the hot corner and was getting quite an earful from some rowdy fans in the seats above our dugout. It made me laugh, hearing stuff like this, but I didn’t want to laugh about it and have Keller see me so I hid my face in my glove, pretending like I was coughing into it. It’s not that Keller would’ve cared, but still, you’ve got to show team unity and all that, and it wouldn’t’ve looked so swell if the fans were riding the third baseman and the shortstop’s laughing at it. The skip would’ve had me carrying luggage for that one for sure, and hell, I’d probably ended up in Kangaroo Court over it too.

So, I was keeping my game face on, you know, because I know how fragile people are when it comes down to it, even big-shot Major Leaguers like Carney Keller, and even if they don’t wear their frowns on the outside, well, I don’t like hurting people’s feelings, even if it’s just in fun. So, I was kind of keeping my full attention plate-wards, trying to keep my cleats from the muddier spots, and brushing my wet glove off on my pants so I wouldn’t have a gloveful of wet when I went to scoop up a grounder, or at least not as soaked of a glove. I’m a stickler for keeping to old habits, of which I’ve got a plenty, as most of us old ballplayers do, being such creatures of routine, always finding things that’ll keep us going through those consistent motions that make us successful over the course of a hundred and sixty two. It’s just a matter of finding a way to be good at something and then perfecting the art of doing that thing over and over until it’s really hard to do that thing any other way. This is especially true of ballplayers, you know us athletic sorts who’ve got to “go with the bones” without thinking at all about what we’re doing. It all has to be instinctual, something you learn to do from doing it so much that it becomes natural, like you’re teaching yourself new instincts, which I know sound like a bunch of hooey, you know, because instincts are supposed to be things you’re born with so how can you learn them, right? But it’s the way it is. At least I think so. Besides, the world we live in, you know, is changing so speedy, well, maybe our instincts for it have to be learned. Maybe after thousands of years we’ll be born with a whole new set of instincts that react to computers the same ways our ancestors reacted to, I don’t know, being attacked by saber-tooths. I don’t know. Anyway, all of this stuff makes us ballplayers a bit more susceptible to magical thinking and superstition. We had a leftfielder once who wouldn’t change his socks during a hitting streak. Luckily for us it only lasted 15 games, but let’s just say that during those weeks there weren’t many guys who wanted to get too close to his locker. We were all a bit thankful when he finally tossed those stinkers out, though we did appreciate the effort. Get good results. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat until the results are always the same. A mantra, or at least the hope, for a ballplayer. This is probably why a lot of guys chew tobacco. Something about the constant rhythm of it, a steadying kind of thing, a constant motion. Me? Well, I’m partial to gum myself. But that day at Wrigley, you know, well, that’s a kind of gum I don’t really much care for, if truth be known, Wrigley’s that is. Just something thin and weak about it. Doesn’t go for long before you’ve got to shove another stick in there for flavor. I’m more of a Trident man myself. A stick of that stuff, peppermint’s tops to me, will get me through more innings than most middle relievers before it’s time for a change. But the stadium was named after the man, not the gum, so.

Any old way, I’m out there at short just biding time until what I think’s looking to be more and more like a rain-delay situation on the horizon. So, well, a lot of buzzing’s going on up in my dome, and I keep getting sidetracked by this question of the never-ending inning. But then a slow roller’s heading my way, and so I go a charging after it, as it just skips past the pitcher and is a bit easier for me to nab than Keller coming in from third. I get to it quick enough. The throw though is going to be a tough one, as I’m in an odd position there, and with the field being in anything but prime condition and the ball being at least somewhat slippery, well, there’s a lot there that can go wrong. I had sure hands and was good about getting in front of the ball. A real slick fielder for the most part, and I trusted my glove. I opt to not go with the barehand just for this reason, and I actually get a decent toss off to first, maybe not as much on it as I would’ve liked, but considering the circumstances, well, it should’ve been enough to get the guy, who wasn’t the fleetest of foot, as I remember it. That is if the throw had been on line. But it wasn’t. I pulled our first baseman Harlan off the bag. Give him credit though. He just about did the splits trying to get the out. I was pissed. I knew I should’ve had the guy. There’s just that part of you that’ll be critical over every little thing, and that was the part that was pissed. I had a bit more time than I’d figured. Should’ve got a more accurate throw off. But oh well, you know? What can you do. Just hobble back to your position and get ‘em next time. But then I start thinking, ‘How many more next times could there be? Could this keep happening over and over.’ I mean, well, because really in baseball there’s really no time limit to the game. Guys could keep getting on base. We could never get another out. This game could go on and on. But also, well, the game had to end. It had to. It boggled my head up pretty good. The uncertainty of it. Nothing was going to happen for sure. We’d all just have to wait and see, even though we knew it had to end, well, there was no way to know absolutely for sure. That didn’t sit well with me. I shook my head and doodled in the dirt with my cleats. All I wanted right then was a weak little popup, a can of corn to sit under, waiting for it to come down and plop into my glove with that reassuring sound, making me feel like everything was okay, that all of this would end, at some point, and we’d all move on, grow older, and get on with our lives. I don’t know why this made me feel good. It gave me hope. Maybe things are all pointless without an end to them? And maybe a person’s life is like that. Sort of like, what’s the meaning of all this if it just goes on and on? It’s got to stop. And with that thought in mind, well, that’s what makes it all worth it. The fact that there is an end out there, a finale, a time when all of this who that we’ve always known and always been will simply cease to be, and somehow that makes life seem more significant, like what we do matters more because one day we won’t ever be able to do it again.

Well, anyway, it made me feel pretty damn wonderful, and I stopped worrying about one long continuous inning that would just keep lasting and lasting eternally, and we got a guy looking, called out on strikes for the third out. Our catcher didn’t drop it, and the ump wound up and made a big theatrical deal about it, and we bounced from our positions and almost skipped back into the dugout where it was dry and warm, and where we knew we couldn’t stay for long, but for the while that we were there, well, we sat around and spit seeds and chewed gum and heckled the ump, shouting out things like, “You’re missing a great game, Blue!” And, well, in the short while that we were there we enjoyed it all as much as we could.

charlamagnetalksagoodgame

2011-06-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

This girl had powerful legs, man. It was like she was a shot put champion or something. But I liked the shade that the tree was making over there, where she was, and so I walked myself on over there. I was tired of being maybe’ed, singing I Am The Walrus striped in neon, sweating it out, and, of course, back in too. Won’t leave that out. Bad for the complexion. A claim at whatever cook’s-hat shit is being labeled all-joked-out when you’re really just kicking over bowling pins without a lane. She was hamming it up, literally, with those thunder thighs pumping in place, with the kind of energy that could blast a locomotive through a mountain of thick basalt. I’m sobering up by this point. It was what they call a sobering sight, I guess. I got all awful and pathetic, and nearly left my place-in-time noticing habits in the gutter there, but I swooped them up and didn’t lose them. Careered towards nothing-better-to-do, particularly there and then, I had a new-carpet stink to me, a pristine smell in my stride, and it was keeping my focus estranged, at least a little, from whatever it was that was really meow-lingering, for a spell, in motivating my motor over that-a-way where she was doing those air step-aerobics. I was punchy with something, that’s for sure. Fast enough, eventually, for grip or gripe, I was able to entertain almost all my thoughts at once, and this had never happened in quite this way before, at least that I could remember. It was easy. It’s like a she-was-just-seventeen sort of thing. The way she looked? Well, I guess I could’ve went ahead and compared it with something, but it was a no-can-do issue with my head all strung, bright and bulby, with ideas like stars, thousands there that I could gaze at and see all of, and all at the same time. Terpsichore moved through me as the gush of thoughts sang, “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely you can always go…” We all want to be rock stars, sing and live and die, all together now. Held in check, though, there I was being ambushed by my lunge towards this lower-body heifer in the style of Carnegie-Hall wannabes. Wonderbreading, as I was, there wasn’t a loaf left in me to pony up anything other than my whole cat-litter soul for all takers to take apart and never put back together ever again, at least not the way it was. It’s all unfair competition at a certain point. I broke for it. I booked past the shade trees and made my living up from pills and this guy keeps saying, “Potions. Potions for sale,” over and over. But he wasn’t just saying it to me. Mother Superior’d gone and jumped the gun. His frown was gone. I got over it. The deep-knee bending chick with shot-putting legs was glorious. She was like a god, or would that be goddess? Hey, Bungalow Bill, you know? Artemis of the concrete. There’s no name for things like that. More to the point would be to say that it’s neither the method of Spencerian or Palmer that matters, but more that there is a method there, and that method is, well, unquantifiable, and, of course, well, ineffable. That’s more to it. Not it. More to it, though. An enfilade of the senses, if you will. Or, hell, even if you won’t. A phalanx of scruffy types were perpetrating crimes against man-made devices, and there I go and get somehow suckered into mumbo-jumboing with the worst of them, ones let’s say who were clothed in the rattier and more flea-infested sort of rags that often times smell of cheesy rot and sun-baked wine. There’s this other guy who’s ranting, “Don’t gotta be so damn cute all the time. Take me back to the wild, to the wild-wild west, why do not cha?” I’m popping in here and there, but not scoping too much. Just Rita-Hayworthing in the mortar of the lord, daubing my jokes on serious walls, jiving around with a Ballet Mecanique clenched in my fist. The squatting-and-rising Lady of The Thick Legs had her eyes closed. I noticed this after sweeping some lint from my eyebrows. I could only get in a peripheral glance, but it was enough. A freshly cool ingot of surprise tumbled and then somehow rolled away from me, and I slid across the heated surface of oh-hell-here-goes-nothing and tried to make it all of heaven’s something. The sky wasn’t at all deeper than I could be, and the equations of star-hopping were not as far out-of-reach and unsolvable as they should’ve been. A pother of distraction emerged from a pendent tailpipe that was almost scraping the street as a pea-green Plymouth clanked and clattered by, and I rushed through fluttering intimacies that were almost the whipping crackle of flags in a great wind. It was too hot and too cold. This deep-knee-bending girl wasn’t giving her attention away for a thing. A surgeon’s concentration. A point she could just stare and stare at like an ice skater spinning. Attached a trifle to everything except herself. God was snoozing through this one. I heard things commuting from lips to ear: “The infinite consists of vowels alone.” Things were getting too easy for the likes of, well, a person like the one I was passing for being then. Badly, sacked when I could’ve been doing so much more, revolving around other lives, but instead just grouchy in the shade. The trapeze of my head was swinging, but back and forth wasn’t ringing the bell backwards like it should’ve been. I wasn’t in the mood to be embarrassed. Then the wind said, “White curtains hang like ghosts in the windows of that building asking if it’s tuesday yet when it won’t be any day now any time soon if weeks stack up and blow by it gets serious if the sun changes expressions over old victorian stick that’s almost worried to rhubarb and mussed cloudy if it sinks to lift if whatever gold doesn’t stay and the longest day of the year is on the wane please be my baby tonight.”

(insert your own punctuation)

2011-06-25T14:56:00.000-07:00

money we all need to be alive

well

that and phones

what little remains

and

oh the tv too

we’ve had strokes over less

that’s lost

on everyone

food is consumed over and

over

headsmelt and there are wars to not

lose or win

but have

like a heart or a

wait a sec

what’s a bluff

right

whose now is this

to have

over

for brunches

of bottomless mournings

laugh

that too

til old grows young

and

murder is born

back to the fanciest

ordered to give

altering matters

of the earth’s surface

work

ousted or

piped down if they were killing

themselves

it’d not be trenches

but beaches with only sand

and no

water in any or

every

waste of

where

ever

de novo

2011-06-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

Man, that guy was just giving a Dirty Sanchez to the Mona Lisa. That’s fronting on a level that’s like way too specious to even begin to like go barking about, at least with the cred and essentials I’m given here, like this, well, you know. God’s playing hooky. Here’s a lopsided set of surroundings that replaces the usual. It’s like equating killing household bugs with homicide, or mass murder for that matter, and it’s things we don’t like thinking about, you know, tiny lives like that. They don’t mean anything to us. Just another squash mark on the wall, a spot of blood on the palm. Holy lord, fixtures in the environment look better, stiller I mean, when fanned with the so-called Winds Of Same. This guy, well he gets nervous, you see? Like without-an-appetite nervous, and this hankering comes along to do good; so this guy makes it his like whole bounty, at the current time, to, at least to all appearances, give something good back to the world he’d swiped so much from. Taking was getting to him. It cramped him, made him feel cornered and unsafe, and he’d get to guitaring with his mouth, almost motorboat-like, and, well, you just had to will it all away, really. It was like ecdysis or something-- only a shedding of layers of personality. And he’s the one carving bad words into glass panels with diamonds? Shit. Sure, something stinks, but it ain’t ruled straight. Even dance halls hold more secrets than....but that only fathers Not Much and Just Barely. Man, that guy? You hear me talking? Well, that guy, he does his best to do good unto others and all that smegma, but it doesn’t get him far enough. He can’t hold his cards so they face just him, you know? It’s holding out and it’s not. Badly aligned or mismanaged constellations of ideas. There’s no telling where he slept at night, or if he even did. Nobody was going to go decapitating him over it or anything, but it still kept this here hunk of crud up at night. Valium doesn’t always cut it. Sometimes you go around just dowsing your sorrows a bit instead of drowning them, spend too much time inside, waiting, trying to get good at doing nothing. Hell, there’ll always be more laundry to do and dishes to wash. We spend too much time between things. But, man, that guy was going at it all wrong, and I won’t be one to shut up about it. Get me stumping and, well, it’ll just never do. That’s all. I’ll barnstorm until the cows come home. It’s a no-win cause. Shit. Some people get pissed off at some small thing that gets done to them, and they stay that way their whole lives, and it’s really miserable, if you ask this chunk of change about it. All this do-gooder foppery is just causing a cathexis, and things build, all that holding inside or whatever you want to call it, well, it balloons, it fills the volcano of you until the top smokes, you know, steam headed, blowing your top, that sort of thing, and then it’s double-bogeying until the cows of your past line up of their own that-there volition to be slaughtered. That’s rough stuff. Don’t I know it. Bust me out of this here cage and I’ll just find another one to trap myself inside of. The real hurt of it, all this guy’s do-gooding that is, was that he was doing it all for his own satisfaction. And, well, go shit in a paint can and call it a fresh coat, that’s not really giving in a way that’s more self-less than selfish, is it? He’s really just looking out for bad old numero uno. That’s what his concern is, there, in that ordered scheme of events. In the end though, is doing good always better than doing, well, bad? I mean, you take a little something, you give something else, and maybe you end up richer for it…or, well, then maybe poorer too, in the end. That’s what gets pinned to your tail after so much “trying” and such. It’s like chopping an onion to get the waterworks going. I’m more likely to shoot myself in the toe if I’m aiming away from others, you know? Maybe that’s a mincing touch on a result-ended gather, but we’re cheap in our expenditures of timely frustration, more than sometimes. Very compact, this guy, in his themes. I could throw a dart with my eyes closed and snag at least a folded corner of the notepaper of his results, well, if he’d kept notes on things as such. Monumental? It’s pawnshopping. That’s the news from the front. He’s got pull though, and when there’s a strength, not that I’m that forgiving or anything, there seems to be more than an uplifting of personal gain at stake. Why can’t I get back to the ocean? Why can’t I get pulled away with the tide? It all stems from some boring self-defeating streak that wins over the humbler and more realistic aspects of your appearance. Doing this or that for appearances only. That’s a loser’s claim at pyrite. Well, well. There’s a little more than sidewalk etiquette involved here, and once in a paper moon you see some guy putting a cigarette out on the armrest of his wheelchair, and then maybe you think to yourself, ‘That couldn’t be me, could it?’ Willing it so, with a headful of cork, you get to paddling in the rapids of the life you’ve suddenly been dumped into living. This guy was never one to go in for something as treacherous as all that though. He could’ve knocked off early after littering the neighborhood with save-the-earth type fliers all afternoon, but this guy didn’t think “quit” should apply to him, or, more importantly, didn’t want it to seem as if he did. It was all about how he was perceived. That which should’ve mattered least in this particular instance came to be what mattered most. But I’m just a hack looking for attention. Who isn’t sometimes? So now, well, everywhere I go the dogs bark at me, and I can’t seem to get a good shave. My will’s shot full of holes. Nobody’ll ever go around making these days up to me. That guy wasn’t up to nothing but no good. And that’s all you need to know about that. The only reason that we’re alive, besides to breed and carry on our species, is to get along in a society, to be social, to be a part of others’ lives and have them be a part of ours. That’s the creek’s-dry meaning of life. If we were seagulls it’d be different, or ants. But we’re not. Like it or piss all over it, we’re humans. And being human we’ve got to find a way to exist with other humans as best we can. There’s really no other reason for us being alive. Those who tend to dwell in solitude are really just living for themselves, performing a sort of escape act from life, from what they should be doing as a social animal: existing and, in some way, communicating with, or to, others. Shit nuggets. What else is there? Well, well. And the world keeps turning. Days blacken to nights and light back to days again, over and over and then some, while we hobble around and mope in the junkyards of our past. It’s nothing. Forget it. Go out into the world and live.

leftovers

2011-06-20T11:07:00.001-07:00

we’ve got blue suede and high tides

and whisky to keep us warm

we’ve got hospital stays

and worries at bay

and hearts shaped like mules

the ocean’s a drop in the pail

of trashy good looks

and runaway heads or hearts on the lam

who could stand

just ground worm meat

and a fan-less tail

not sleepers like us

not for banana peels

not for cigarettes

we’ve got splashed eyes

and soda water

we’ve got harm to hot-wire

we’ve got shady sides of the street

a pigeon named dove

a smoker you love

and a bad time

that’s all good all around

when it’s getting later than it should

when crying laughs like it could

then we’ll paint trash cans

moon colors à la mode

while waiting

for mailboxes like also-rans

to give up

and just explode

higher tides

2011-06-14T12:24:00.000-07:00

Jesse James: So it’s like everybody I know is there, and it’s lovely.

Hermann Hesse: Lovely?

Jesse James: Delightful.

Hermann Hesse: …

Jesse James: Surroundings of cocktails. Geared up for heading way up steep slopes, too. The road impossibly steep out the windshield.

Hermann Hesse: Who’s driving?

Jesse James: Not me. I’m in the backseat.

Hermann Hesse: That’s important. Everything and everyone is a symbol, something you’ve created for only you. Even people you’ve met once, you form a judgment about what they are to you. They can become a symbol of something deep within yourself that you’re struggling to understand or relate to, or let out. Think about it this way: the car is your life. Whoever is driving the car is controlling your life.

Jesse James: I don’t drive.

Hermann Hesse: See? The dream’s telling you something. You’re taking a backseat in the story of your life.

Jesse James: But I don’t even own a car.

Hermann Hesse: It doesn’t matter. It’s a collective-conscious thing.

Jesse James: I find myself walking through rooms of places I used to live, but they’re not really the same, the places that is, as they were when I lived there, but they are the same, kind of. There’s plaster dripping from the walls. Ceilings are caving in. Holes in the floor. Bare boards and exposed beams, termite-ridden rafters. And extra rooms that were never there with strange people in them. I’m always barefoot, watching out for nails, you know?

Hermann Hesse: Barefoot? That’s important.

Jesse James: It is?

Hermann Hesse: Yes. Definitely. The places you used to live symbolize parts of your life you aren’t dealing with well. Maybe it’s something resurfaced from a past you can’t quite erase or forget about, you can’t move on from or get over. Things are falling apart in these places. The past isn’t going anywhere; it’s just growing mold and waiting.

Jesse James: Shit. That sucks.

Hermann Hesse: Suck it does. But there’s hope for us in the letter-writing times we’ve left behind. There’s dashed courage lying around dead to applause, insulated from cheer, and we make choices and don’t even have to pray about it.

Jesse James: The poor cold days. Thieves behind us gathering wool and moss. That sounds like a drunkard’s plea in the wilderness to me.

Hermann Hesse: I’m dancing, from now on, until there’s something to dance about.

Jesse James: Sounds like an empty coffee pot left on the stove.

Hermann Hesse: If we’ve got time left for things like that.

Jesse James: Forgeries make themselves up out of the smell of just-struck matches.

Hermann Hesse: Strike anywhere. Just don’t strike on me.

Jesse James: The messages we get make the ones we don’t seem lost or indisposed by nonsense, which is the furthest from the truth you could get, really. Shark out what’s killing you, if the soup stinks of foul play. Don’t get yourself upset over nothing if it’s just something.

Hermann Hesse: And I’m here stuck with all of this hocus-pocus in the fuel lines.

Jesse James: If one of us grows deaf then one of us will be done listening.

Hermann Hesse: Talking is useless except as a metaphor. Tasting does the job better.

Jesse James: There are clowns and barbarians stealing my pillow right out from under my head. My eyes get stuck shut. I can’t wake up. I walk around in somebody else’s house while I’m asleep, and I know that I’m still asleep, but I just keep wandering around strange places, looking for what I know not, and the whole time just wishing I could wake up. But when I do wake up I only end up wishing I could’ve stayed asleep longer.

Hermann Hesse: A cold spell; or is it a snap?

Jesse James: It ain’t nothing but an x-y-z thing.

Hermann Hesse: Work at it, like water. We get so isolated in our spheres of habitual behaving. It’s hard to see outside of them. Take up the cello. Make a song out of your boringest days. It’s ideas of space and time that matter least when it comes to being you. Everybody shares whatever it is they’ve got.

Jesse James: Pinko bastard.

Hermann Hesse: Durations of what we call getting-through-the-day thoughts, roasting marshmallows in the same old fire, it makes horoscopes seem to sing, and we place bets on morning being there when we wake up. Shoemakers tell it like it is.

Jesse James: I hear that about them. I hear those things on the street; they go around. If a body should see a body when that body’s fast asleep. If another body sees a body sleeping. Well, I am descended from a long line of cave painters and pickup artists. It’s my blessing.

Hermann Hesse: Planes to catch and bills to pay. We get tied down, try to undo what we’ve done to get us that way, and what it means to you…?

Jesse James: Less and more each and every day. Sometimes it’s just trees, and they’re undressing, and we’ve got enough salad to last until dawn gets ornery with wind.

Hermann Hesse: Like sealing storms in a time capsule that you bury deep in your heart.

Jesse James: Sure. Maybe something like that.

Hermann Hesse: It goes with everything, this weather.

Jesse James: I wear reindeer-skin boots. It’s an adult thing to do, to be adult about it.

Hermann Hesse: Yes. We’re all about the same in our adult lives in the levels of our being grown up, no matter how old we get. It’s either young or old. Maybe a few ages we actually feel. That’s all we’ve got.

Jesse James: Stunned, I get chancy and three-headed monstered, sap-sticky, bungling through shifting landscapes, dreams that intertwine and go nowhere except around and around. In a loop, lapping myself. God’s not watching. I’m on my own. It’s not getting any safer or scarier, and I’m rarely nice in these dreams. In fact, I’m mean as hell to everyone.

Hermann Hesse: Nowhere to lean.

Jesse James: Through the thorns I lean, meanly.

Hermann Hesse: Oh, yes. That. That could help. Sure. But eat your moral vegetables too. Don’t kid yourself about the vitamin and mineral content of your soul.

Jesse James: Hardly does it.

Hermann Hesse: Keep dreaming.

Jesse James: No problem there. It’s not going to stop until…well, until something-something.

Hermann Hesse: Get a load of the airfares on this guy.

Jesse James: First class just won’t cut it anymore. I’m my own cheap tickets, bargaining away my good sense, at that. Cloudy? That says the least of what’s most…mostly, at least, gone.

Hermann Hesse: If there were, perhaps, a little kid in these dreams maybe I could be of some help.

Jesse James: Another something I’ve left behind?

Hermann Hesse: A famished thing. You think you can’t afford to feed it anymore.

Jesse James: One of these days. One of these days. I think I’ll get on back home, one of these days.

Hermann Hesse: Apparently that’s not a new thought to you.

Jesse James: It’s just making believe. I do it well. Bedtime for sweeter things than these. I catnap in the arms of strangers with a wild card up my sleeve. There are things that even dreams can never tell.

Hermann Hesse: Boyish and uneasy, never resting well, boiled in icy waters. That’s what you don’t tell yourself about it.

Jesse James: If it’s dangerous to be beside yourself with the broke stuff then I can’t manage the sumptuous also. Variation is calling long distance for a better deal. I’m tired. Tired of kidding myself and everybody else.

Hermann Hesse: Could’ve had you any day.

Jesse James: Yes. Out of kindness.

Hermann Hesse: I suppose.

Jesse James: Always late for something, running out of time, in these dreams. That’s another thing. There’s never enough time. I’m always packing, scrambling around to try and get things in order, and everything’s falling apart, and I can’t get any clothes to fit, and my oldest and best friends are leaving me behind, moving on, and I’m stuck with an expired plane ticket and a calculator watch whose giant neon-green display just blinks 999. Sometimes I’m on a bike, but it won’t ride over the gravel road, it’s so steep, and the wind’s so cold, and I keep thinking I can get a ride, you know? Hitchhike even. But it keeps not happening. And my legs won’t work. They get stuck, like in slo-mo, and I keep thinking that I’m late and there’s nothing I can do about it, and it feels like it’s the most important thing in the world that I’m missing out on, and there’s this awful feeling of being left out, left behind, being the one not picked for a kickball game at recess in grade school. I’m alone. Everything’s moved on except for me. And then I wake up and it’s way earlier than I want it to be. It’s not pleasant.

Hermann Hesse: The past doesn’t ever go anywhere, does it?

Jesse James: No. It just comes back to stub your toe when you’re trying to catch the last bus leaving to where you think you’ve always wanted to go, to be, to live out the rest of your life.

Hermann Hesse: Something like that, maybe. But in the meantime, well, get yourself some rest. Nobody’s cut out for this kind of self-torture. Let yourself sleep.

Jesse James: But…but, per chance to dream?

Hermann Hesse: No. Well. That’s not what I meant. Still, don’t treat it as the enemy. It’s too easy to defend yourself from your own attacks. Be patient with others. They’re not out to get you. And if they are? Well, that’s just selfishness, and why would you want to be involved in the accrual of yellow bile?

Jesse James: Maybe a better question is, “What is it that makes me the person who I happen to be?”

Hermann Hesse: It's infinite, no?

Jesse James: …clouds go shuffling by the moon while I count seagulls and monitor my pulse. I grow tired of others’ sock situations. While imbibing isotonic beverages the glow of a TV lights my room at night.

Hermann Hesse: But who are we to tell ourselves who we are? It’s just something, maybe, that we find out the more we get used to living the way we do, the more people who come to know us and whom we get to know, it all just figures out, even if it seems phony or trite or dismally normal. We somehow manage. And sometimes we even get to paint tropical scenes on coasters with toothbrushes. Dream of running water; wake up parched.

Jesse James: I’m being used improperly. Killing rattlesnakes doesn’t have to be my business, my only way out, the strangling of serpents. I get by, hang my weary head from the torture of my day job, and every night, from the great heights and distances of my dreams, I quit.

Hermann Hesse: You grow older and spend money and come to depend on necessity to get you from here to another here. We’ve inherited things like hiccups from our fishy ancestors, things that only get in the way of breezing through our normal existence.

Jesse James: As the sun goes around sprinkling diamonds over bashful clouds, well, we get sleepy and called out looking on strikes. A trembling in the leaves, or more like a shudder really, as the stiff fingers of a sharp wind ice through, stingy, crackling, and the lightning hasn’t happened yet but the birds are aware of something brisk and indefatigable, a hunter with too much prey so she stops aiming and just shoots in a fish-in-a-barrel way, hoping without much to hope against. There’s plenty of me left; I just don’t know what to do with it, where to put the stuff of my life, the who-I-am that drives the jonquil from the kiss.

Hermann Hesse: Driving. Driving. That’s more to the point than floriography could ever get.

Jesse James: Where we go, well, Jesus, ain’t nobody knows, right?

Hermann Hesse: Listen, the peacock doesn’t get along as well as the peahen, even though it looks pretty with its fanned tail of a thousand eyes. Being okay or better on the surface isn’t ipso facto the best way to survive. Maybe the fancy plumage that you go around showing off for others is really just a wimp’s hiding place.

Jesse James: The sky’s shiny platter forebodes necessity, and perhaps a chance at rain. I don’t look deep enough into things. I get distracted by the lacquered charm of the façade. And then what if I think, not just to myself, ‘The smell of cigarettes is better than smoking.’?

Hermann Hesse: Maybe drop the kids off at the cleaners and go bowling.

Jesse James: We sleep through our dreams most of time, don’t we?

Hermann Hesse: It does seem that way.

Jesse James: Pathetic, isn’t it?

Hermann Hesse: Don’t ask me. I don’t even work here. I’m just passing through on shore leave from Higher Up.

Jesse James: Figures.

pulled plugs

2011-06-08T22:20:00.000-07:00

So, here’s an odd one for you. This guy I know, well, he’s got trouble with his woman. I tried to tell him I don’t talk to people with tucked-in shirts, but he don’t listen, you know? He’s got his own agenda. Always going on about some slight or thing he thinks’s been done to him. Always the short end of the stick with this guy. Never a thing he can do about it, too. Nuts. I tell you. But what’re you going to do when low-to-medium level crushes enter into the arena? But this guy, it’s like he’s built with stitches. I could tell you some stories. Showmanship as pink as adobe walls at sunset. Nothing but a mood to relax in, or out of. With this guy it’s all a computer repair shop waiting to go out of business. Some people never grow out of being themselves. Maybe we’re all somebody else at some point, and then we keep being other people, and we get stuck and can never get back to being just us. Don’t know. Could be he’s just more comfortable with being downtrodden, and he’s sticking to it. A man can’t live on lettuce alone. It’s like when you hear this one song and it gets another song stuck in your head so you start singing the other song, the one that’s not the song you heard, and you can’t remember how this song got stuck in your head, which it is now, and so you start backtracking to see where it came from, and you can’t, you can’t remember. That’s like this guy’s dilemma. It’s not that he’s forgetful. He’s just desultory, jumping from one thing to the next. No concentration or staying power. It’s always off to something new with him. It makes you start to think that nothing matters, that he doesn’t take things serious enough. But that’s not it. He just can’t stay on one thing for long. He’s a stream that just flows and doesn’t know from whence it came. Long time I’ve known this guy. He’s swell. He’s a good egg. Strangeness becomes him. Everywhere we go, he and I, there’s light from above shining down, or below, up at us. It doesn’t matter. It does though when he’s around. I don’t know. There’s nothing fishy about it. He’s just got trouble with his woman. She does him wrong, you know? Sometimes that’s how it goes. Do all of our own personal problems seem that stupid to other people? Probably. Who’s pearly enough to slip by? That bastard’s not making any heads roll. Got to know when to quit, somehow. Leaked, fortunately, my way was the times he spent shackled to barstools, pouring enough whisky into his gut to make a seagull shit its feathers. I made the most of it, at least. Do your taxes and kick the rich to the gutter. It’s a matter of downing one thing to replace another more decrepit thing in your never-ending satchel of things. We’re talking volume, of course, and I don’t mean to make small the guy’s pattering two-step through the fields of deflated, hunkering-down men, but it’s just the opposite really, if you stop and cram about it, like the night before a Scantron test where you’ve got a decent chance of just guessing, or intuiting the answer anyway. But more’s the less for now, and I don’t want to get all pansy-driven with the whole thing. It’s mostly, like I said, a volume issue. That’s enough to get a hand-me-down opinion out of it, as far as I care to go with the matter. World’s enough of wrong without me adding to it. So, this guy, well, he gets to shopping around for a good time, and, well, he sometimes gets what he’s looking for, you know? Nothing official. Just weeping trails leading nowhere special. Had a lot to hang his hat on though, in those times that he acknowledged the need for it. He didn’t have the stomach for holding lies, and he made up most of what he needed with reservations a plenty, and then screaming, “I don’t need you. I don’t need you!” down narrow hallways when it’s too early to be late. The pitter of his hectoring was pattering most of what he didn’t need to say, cured of care, and he wasn’t pleased to be emasculated the way he was mostly all of the time by his Lady Of The Sour Waters, but the telephone booths of his dreams were all out of order or ripped from the wall, so really there wasn’t much left to go on chatting about unless you brought your tennis racket along for company. For a song he’d tie one on like a bandana over his face so he could rob the bank of what you thought you’d get to know or, well, not comprehend because your hands were too cold for that. He wasn’t bare or lacking in the conceptual mechanisms for restraint. It was more of a Larry-Curly-Moe thing, if you go in for smithereenish shit like that. I’ll tell you something about astronauts if you want, but it’ll never take the outer out of space, you know? Same thing. Phased in and out. Choppy and forgiving, too. So, this guy’s got his woman troubles. This guy, he’s a mess. He’s spilling his willpower all over the bar. Raided, a savage for whisky, clouding around, and he mistakes rainbows for jumpsuits, and then, just then, he jacks up the rent and pushes you out a window for a laugh. Don’t get me wrong, or right for that matter, he’s all hammers without nails, but still, you’ve got to keep a wary eye on his maneuvering. Field a grounder. Bunt a guy over. Vest-pocket your wimpy satisfaction. That’s what’ll keep you sure enough to find a current to drift away on. Well, this guy, he goes from zero to drunk in no time, and stays there for a long time. Had to get him outside. He’d eat cockroaches, that guy. Reprimand him about it? No. That wasn’t my job. They can’t train that shit into me. Gun me down with hindsight. It won’t matter. Time won’t tell. Let’s get on with it. Shit. So, let’s absorb a few blows here and marry the affair to the drift of it. God hurt us. Blessed we be with this Shinola. Very tempting, in this way, out of sorts, tempted out of it though, so, here goes, or doesn’t. We’ll see.

Something of a ballast, mostly made of cheap wine and hogwash, kept him righted. I can’t tell you a lot of things, but the few I’ve got are more pith than petering out, that you can be sure of. And this guy, he says things like, “It’s nothing but slag and dross. But enough of that scoriaceous crap. More water. More vegetables. Less sore throats. That’s all I’m asking. My song ain’t going to change much, so get used to it. Let’s fiddle around with the old deal, get a grip on stage presence and putting up a backside to it, and then maybe we’ll have that result of effort and manageable half-asses on our side. Been over and underdone on that front all too many times. Have at it with the rest. Skip me. I’m done and rumpled. Don’t want Monday to come around no more.” Yep. Says things like that all the time. And he gets himself deep into his thoughts, well, then we’ve got whisky-soaked nightmares to deal with, and it’s off with their hats, you know? He also says things like, “I look into the mirror. The thing I see? That thing? It’s not the me that everybody else sees. I can’t see myself like that. I see myself…differently.” He goes on like this pretty damn often. Well, often enough that I’d mention it. One night, maybe, let’s say, you find yourself parked next to him at the bar, and he’s spieling and sputtering, getting himself motioned and maudlin, qualifying the edges of what’s scared to see him like that, there, a pester to any ear close by. I bent mine. Got some bucketful of talk. So, there’s the woman who’s done him wrong. Of course there’s that. Plus, we’ve got conniptions cocktailing away inside him, burstful, and then he’s back on two legs, the barstool tipped and steady though, and shredded discounts to competitors if they can put up with this crazy-legged taunt. And I’m not a softy by any means, you know. But take the red eye out of my photos, please, you know? Well, that too. I could go on, and I would, but this guy, well, he’s burping off what’s left of his standoff, so there’s little to do but wait it out. Raise the bar or bow out. He’s gargling on about the deep-blue sea of his memories or something that’s more porcelain-tinged than that. Borrowed’s better for the most part. On with it, badly though at first, he goes. No help for that. Dressed to stay. Morninged through the days until the nights get the better of neon gone off spluttering sparked contagious blips of joy, or jumpy too, if you will, about what tomorrow’s going to get a glove on only to let dribble through the infield, maybe chalking the grass a bit. He was selling jokes for beers that night, and he’d bundled away quite a few gigglers for the occasion. By the time I got to him he was beer-groggy, sotted and sappy, and the only thing that’d do was more, there being no room for any other ambitions or aspiring to other ends than the ones he’d been greedily filling up on already. Out to lunch. Be back after dinner. That sort of a situation. Borrowed means. I got into the habit of referring to him as A Man Who Was Thursday, but that did little alleviate his paranoia of incognito recognition, or, this is just to say, being apprehended by clockwork ghosts, sometimes howling, “My car! My car! My cupcake for a cup of cake!” It suited him, this sort of thing. And on some once-in-a-while occasions he’d mimic vibrant green leaves scratched with lemon falling through daylight. Those were times that rubied to a shimmer, at least in the pick-of-the-litter way I’ve got of remembering them, that way. Clearly it’s not just a matter of bowing in or around the matter. He’d come at you with his eyes stunned, chewing ice, certain of something irascible scrabbling through to get you caught slightly on and off guard at once. And the charge’d gut you, empty you of pretenses and maybe pirate your purpose too. Duped? Somehow not at all. It’s a courtesy flush for the questioning of your nature. How it affects me, not you, you know? That third-place-finish sort of a thing. Let’s whip up a meal here and fix unlikely attention on stunted contraptions of a real true-blue mensch, a cause for a smile or at least a celebratory wink, something saying, “Here it goes. Here it goes.” It’s all refrangible around about now any new how. Test cases exempted, of course, tanking it for sure, maybe, if going off is leading steeply nowhere, well, then let’s partake in an old deal of rug slicing and wah watusiing the devil out of Noah Webster while we’re at it. Might as well. It’s peek-a-boo or piss-and-pooh, as far as I’ll let on about it. This guy though? He’ll get started in a fish tank and end up bowling you over for spare change. Grab a bucket of rain and start bailing, you know? So, he’s going on about his sorry state of To-Mother-Russia-With-Love shackled resentment, gushing glue-wayed and more than marble for a being’s time, honest-to-the-devil, warm as heaven, and punching back just to please himself. That about does it. Varnish me with peanut oil and play a vulture-bone flute. Sun-eyed, cloud-brained, milked and rerouted, and then he lays this one on me.

“Mosey on out to the cove’s last by-a-breath reaches, out there where the ocean’s swelling without pride, swollen with tears, more likely, like the way a stranger says goodbye, it models moods for the trees, that, of course, we all once wore, dripping with god’s perspiration, pouting with remorseful eyebrows. I am not a piano but she plays me just the same. Virtue, for me, has become passé. Supper’s forever late, and I’m storming kitchens, tying boredom’s twine to firewood that’s too wet to ever burn. I make it out as far as compassion will let me most nights, still. Nope. Not under the volcano yet. Not me. But maybe that dim echo down the staircase is a harbinger of doomed things yet to come for me. Passionate people? It’s something they speak of in movies, or there’s the possibility of love songs. Undertake the stance you never could stand, and all these days and nights go by again and again, and yet you’re still here, just like me, waiting it all out. Salvation’s so far from here when you wish you had another round while I just wish for one last beer. It’s all making that track-cleats-on-asphalt sound, and we haven’t come so far, really, have we? Bargain with me. Come on. I let on about it all all the time. Manage a way through it though. My make and model number are etched on a silver amulet some broad wears around her neck, and she’s my only true love. That’s what I think, at least. No business as unusual as this business. So, let’s accept the changing conception you might have of another person, give ground on a few less fronts. Saturn lies waiting for a ring, you better bet on it. Gosh or golly all over it, then scrub off the grease while the pain’s still bystandering. Hell, that’s what they all say. Like ruined rain, it’s the bordering of hostile reactions, the fiction of mangled third courses still scrounging around for appetizers. Left? Nothing that wasn’t already gone in the first place. Well, buckled into the passenger’s seat I go, dancing with shadows and vanishing swept into the gutter. Hell, it’s whisky weather. Let’s bundle up. I’m leading the back of the charge. Rusty with what my dreams never let on about, like some syrup-headed Bindle Stiff on the lam from comfort and ease. Lowly, but in charge of my personality at least. Caved in. That’s where it all begins. A taking off point, if you will. Or won’t. Never is easy enough to conjure up, and still they’ll be saying ‘was’ about me someday. It’s a matter of being early before it gets too late. So, the question in question here is one about splitting the spilt sand of indifference, taking mushy wet concrete matters into your hands, and here I go getting humble and mischievous at the same time, mulling, and then, well, I started off with the soft stuff and moved past some herded-cattle daymares, that’s where we’ll get our going to for now, and that’ll be forever, for now.

“We had eyes to catch the traces of where it all was going, but being blind to it was easier, so that’s what I was partaking in at the time. Had to keep her at a distance that was becoming more dangerous with each turn of the world. Bargaining was a holdout from simpler times when we’d ogle sunsets and trashcans and people trotting along all loaded-up with clothes from the Laundromat, tumbled and windswept expressions, a keening almost stirring the air; and it wasn’t trouble-- the sky declining invitations to host dark cloudbelly while we waited with clenched hands and pursed lips-- that moved through us, beset by ulcered misgivings, or whatever it might have been that, with problematic jumps from sheets to covers, we were consuming in chunks like raw bacon. I bet drink solves a few things now and then. It seems odd that it wouldn’t, at least twice in a while. But, hell, don’t let me get cranky and blow a gasket over it. There’s no surer way to tell good than by hustling the bad. I’m through with waiting things out; trying doesn’t get me nothing except dissatisfied, and leaves me only with more problems to boot.

“Poor at most things. That’s nothing. Forget about it. Being handy comes in good at a cost. Everything goes, and it goes so fast. Scott free, left like it mostly, and wandering into the scummiest of places, that’s as bad a chance as any I’ll take at being myself into the wee hours. Drained is not how I lurk, and if romance is lacking at home, well, give me a bible and a gun, and send me on my way. Long changed. Hopping down from castled heights. There we go, or I do, again, being amenable to the haddock weather of my whims, or hers, or the ones the barkeep keeps handing up to me from depths I’m sure I’ll sink to find once again, not as steady as this, or that, for that matter, either. God’s hooks, I’ve got a sandblasting nature tonight. I wasn’t always this way; but it’s like when the moon kicks up its heels, or something as so-so as mice rummaging through the floor-dropped scraps I’ve purposely left for them to munch on, or nibble, or whatever it is that they do with bits of cracker and cigar ash. Digesting is for Arabian fish; that’s what I used to always say. If now, maybe, it ain’t so? Well, I still say it, even if it ain’t so much now. I’m less cursed than cured though, if my lies check their veracity at the gates of Eden, so to misspeak. But I carry on nonethemore, sneaking front-and-back-ways through a confidential parlor door. Sure, I get a bit dippy at times, but who don’t?

“I was hard up for a livelihood, scumming about from bar to bar, damaged bads, though up and in also, and a whole lot of neverminding between the skull with just whisky and beer sloshing around in there. Meddling was getting me into the chaperone seat, so I stopped asking and answering, and then just co-opted some mettle to wait out of the whole bell and whistle of the thing, or so I hoped. A one-man think tank sprouting from a barstool. The ideas were dozened out for a dime though, and dusty light bulbs went on with their dim business, hanging from corroded wires, buzzing and swaying slightly. There’s freedom in chimelessness too. Sometimes it’s just hard to admit stuff like this. Necklaces get lopped off in the life of night. You wink and something sparkles there for a moment, then it’s gone and it never comes back. You find yourself staring in the mirror and wondering where this face came from. Lord, the thoughts that go and come. We weld ourselves together from discarded parts, and then this is somehow supposed to make us feel less small? But in here, well, I keep getting gollied around here, and so I drink away the days to forget the nights, and vice versa, you know? Pretty late or ugly soon, it turns out. Well, well. Ahem. And all the likes too. I’m all stuffing and mad-lib headed on these crazy-legged noons. Spray me down with a fire hose and call it an evening. Can’t stand so well, and walking? That’s in of the answer, and here I am left worrying all this worry away.

“She left me. I ran away. That’s the most of it. I kept a lid on my kettle for a time there, shucked my image as a bread-and-buttered loser, while thinking all along that that’s a good way to lose a toe. And the republic falls. And the mayor breaks wind. All over town we hear news about the Mashed Potato flailing back into style, but nobody pays attention to the right things. We’re all just humans here to help each other out, and not just when we find it convenient or when it suits us. Things got to be better than easy but worse than rough. So, go ahead; the sunshine’s not new enough; I can’t wash my eyes in it anymore. Bend me a paperclip; lend me your tears. Powerless, weak, and exhausted. Uncle. Too bad to be false. Uncle.

“Last night’s hero is tomorrow’s bum. Recoup a loss for the sake of one last chance to win. And that girl? Well, one thing about her was that she had the squiggliest hair I’d ever seen. Something chicken-scratched with a pencil. I’d about had it with being normal, so it was a go-figure situation. She was pray-telling and scotch-plastered by the time I got to her, waxing crescent, chummed and shut up, too, if you figure a wallop of guilt in there courtesy of a phone call she was probably not scared enough to make. Find a girl; settle down. That’s got the appeal of a candied walnut, or it should maybe somewhere up the line, if somebody besides god might be asking. My fault? Maple syrup farms are nice to visit, but…

“Try keeping time with the charm of swallow trackers on your trail. Gasoline behind us, thieves just up ahead. Smuggling bashes a few windows of indifference, but I’ve mottled my charisma more than occasionally, and it’s enough to know I’m bottled now, canned and babied to near death, and all here is calm and all is shitty, that’s all I got to make out of it, at most, if the way I see it is seeing it the way it’s seen but never known. She’d suss out a sty in midnight’s moonlit eye, you know the type. Bad for nothing. Cover your telescopes and your bird-watching binoculars; there ain’t a thing to see, boys. The opera’s closed up shop and left town. Now the trains’ve run out of time, and we’re left murdering instincts, hunting suicides until they confess to a crime they’re afraid to commit, battling axed deliverance with a bologna-slice smile. Yep, she gave away the mustard and kept the pickles and olives for the birds. For the birds. Just like love. Now? Well, there’s dancing to be done, and lonely times will never tell. So, buckle up. Hold onto your cats and masks. Goofing around is just around the cul-de-sac a few less times than we’ll never squarely know like this again. Felled just like this, again. And then I’m stooped over observing the lacquered wooden doors of churches, light headed and dizzy as always, day dreaming about sleep that’ll never come; and it’s the outlines of people you see walking towards you: sun-edged, wavy lined things that hold water and have squirmy hair shadows. Then, of course, it’s retreat time. Don’t hesitate or you’ll blow it. But the bustle in my head gets too loud for small talk. Mulishness will not do. Obstacle-coursing through muddled thoughts, differing spots here and there of clarity that don’t do a damn of good for any or all involved, though I must admit I’m like the rest when it comes to feigning action in the constant purgatory of the heart. How greenly didst thou putt, my dear? You know? Just end up confused, but, you know, not bored. That’s a loser-wins situation if you ask this trounced pushpin of a guy. Anyway, the barkeep keeps pushing more drinks across the boards.

“Estimating my time of arrival at 5:53 in the pea em, well, that wasn’t going to do Billy or Francine any of what I consider good. Even if you ask Kendall, well, Kendall, that’s a whole-a-neither-this-or-that story. It’s plausible I was late. That’s what not having a good timepiece will do to one’s ETA. Billy needs propanolol to take a leak in a public bathroom. So, this is coming from a guy who’s keeping much to himself. Just saying. He’s on the shy side. Not one to talk to strangers or bother with others’ problems unless he damn well is forced to. Every night he spills everything he owns on the kitchen floor and picks it up again. Can’t get a bead on that guy, Billy. Shit.

“So I’m supposed to be somewhere, properly, at a specified time, and it’s hard to knuckle out of this promise in what seemed to me to be an assuredly unpromising situation, what with all the hysteria and dramatics over Billy’s new cushy surroundings. It’s like, ‘Snap out of it,’ you know? This was quite the quotable line when we were kids. I get there when I get there. That’s plenty. I think so. It doesn’t matter. Everybody’s an idiot when they’re in love. The trees talk to you, tell you that they’re brainy. I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe in, well, that. It gets later and later. That’s all it does. Ever.”